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.
Substack is often portrayed as an alternative to the mainstream media, but the presence of AI-generated writing is something it shares with many traditional news websites. In some cases, at outlets including Sports Illustrated, CNET, and the AV Club, readers and other journalists have uncovered articles that appeared to be entirely crafted by AI. Generative AI has also been incorporated into news products in other ways; most recently The Wall Street Journal announced it was testing AI-generated article summaries, and the Associated Press has used some form of AI for specific story types for a decade.
Some readers either don’t notice or aren’t bothered when writers they love embrace AI tools. GPTZero’s findings indicate that plenty of people are consuming and enjoying newsletters written with the help of AI, and other writers may soon try to replicate their success by adopting the technology as well.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be backlash or pushback. GPTZero is launching a free “certified human” badge for bloggers to display, anticipating a future where guaranteeing that you don’t use AI becomes an important selling point. This type of disclaimer is already appearing in other creative industries. The credits of the new A24 horror movie Heretic, for example, included a disclosure: “No generative AI was used in the making of this film.”
Over the next few years, similar badges and seals asserting that creative works are 100 percent human may proliferate widely. They could make worried consumers feel like they’re making a more ethical choice, but seem unlikely to slow the steady seep of AI into the media and film industries.