Some of Substack’s Biggest Newsletters Rely On AI Writing Tools

Substack does not have an official policy governing the use of AI. One of Substack’s cofounders, Hamish McKenzie, has described the generative AI boom as a sea change that writers will need to confront, regardless of their personal views on the tech: “Whether you’re for or against this development ultimately doesn’t matter. 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 to generate entire posts whole cloth. David Skilling, a sports agency CEO who runs the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED he sees AI as a substitute editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling. “AI-detection tools may detect the use of AI, but there’s a huge difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted.”

Subham Panda, one of the writers of Spotlight by Xartup (over 668,000 subscribers), which covers news about startups around the world, said that his team uses AI as an “assistive medium to help us curate high-quality content faster.” He stressed that the newsletter primarily relies on AI to create images and to aggregate information and that writers are responsible for the “details and summary” contained in their posts.

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 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 Claude to help him copyedit. “I will write out my thoughts, research, things that I want included, and I will plug it in,” he says. Belanger also creates custom GPTs (versions of ChatGPT tailored for specific tasks) to help polish more technical writing that includes specific jargon, which he says reduces the number of hallucinations the chatbot produces. “For publishing in finance or trading, there are a lot of nuances … AI’s not going to know, so I need to prompt it,” he says.

Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have a relatively low amount of AI-generated writing. For example, two other AI-detection companies recently found that close to 40 percent of content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But a large portion of the suspected AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while the AI writing on Substack is being published by powerhouse accounts.