Substack has no official policy on the use of AI. One of Substack's co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, has described the generative AI boom as a huge change that writers will have to face, regardless of their personal views on the technology: “Whether you're for or against this development, there's ultimately not allowed. It's happening,” he wrote in a Substack post last year.
Several of the Substack authors WIRED spoke to emphasized that they used AI to polish their prose rather than generate entire posts. David Skilling, the CEO of a sports agency that 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 productivity tools in my businesses,” says Skilling. “AI detection tools can detect the use of AI, but there is a huge difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted.”
Subham Panda, one of the writers of Spotlight by .” He emphasized that the newsletter relies primarily on AI to create images and gather information, and that writers are responsible for the “details and summary” in their messages.
Max Avery, a writer for the financial newsletter Strategic Wealth Briefing With Jake Claver (over 549,000 subscribers), says he uses AI writing software like Hemingway Editor Plus to polish his rough drafts. He says the tools help him “get more work done in content creation.”
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 chatbot Claude to help him with copy. “I'll write down my thoughts, research, and things I want to include, and I'll plug it in,” he says. Belanger also creates custom GPTs (versions of ChatGPT tailored to specific tasks) to improve more technical writing that contains specific jargon, which he says reduces the number of hallucinations the chatbot produces. “For financial or trading publications, there are a lot of nuances… AI won't know, so I have to provide clues for it,” he says.
Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have relatively little AI-generated writing. For example, two other AI discovery companies recently discovered that nearly 40 percent of content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But much of the supposedly AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while the AI writing on Substack is published by major accounts.
