Substack has no official policy governing its use of AI. Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack's co-founders, has described The generic AI boom is one big change that writers will have to face, regardless of their personal views on the technology: “Whether you are for or against this development, it ultimately doesn't matter. It's happening,” he wrote in a Substack post last year.
Many of the Substack writers WIRED spoke to emphasized that they used AI to polish their prose rather than craft entire posts. David Skilling, CEO of a sports agency who runs the popular football newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED that he sees AI as a replacement editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling. “AI-detection tools can detect the use of AI, but there is a big difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted.” There is a difference.”
Subham Panda, one of the authors of Spotlight by Used as a medium. He emphasized that the newspaper relies primarily on AI to create images and collect information and that writers are responsible for the “description and summary” contained in their posts.
Max Avery, author of the financial newsletter Strategic Wealth Briefing with Jake Cleaver (over 549,000 subscribers), says he uses AI writing software like Hemingway Editor Plus to polish his rough drafts. He says these tools help him “get more done on the content-creation front.”
Financial entrepreneur Josh Belanger says he similarly uses ChatGPT to streamline the writing process for his newsletter, Belanger Trading (over 350,000 subscribers), and relies on the chatbot cloud to help with copy-edits. Are. “I'll write down my ideas, research, things I want to include, and I'll plug it in,” he says. Belanger also creates custom gpt (versions of ChatGPT tailored for specific tasks) help refine more technical writing that includes specific jargon, which they say reduces the number of hallucinations produced by the chatbot. “For publications in finance or business, there are a lot of nuances… the AI won't know, so I need to prompt it,” he says.
Compared to some of its competitors, the amount of AI-generated writing at Substack is relatively low. For example, two other AI-detection companies recently found Nearly 40 percent of the content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But a large portion of questionable AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while AI writing on Substack is being published by powerhouse accounts.