Kate Knibbs
The most popular writers on Substack earn up to seven figures each year primarily by persuading readers to pay for their work. The newsletter platform’s subscription-driven business model offers creators different incentives than platforms like Facebook or YouTube, where traffic and engagement are king. In theory, that should help shield Substack from the wave of click-courting AI content that’s flooding the internet. But a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED indicates that Substack hosts plenty of AI-generated writing, some of which is published in newsletters with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
The AI-detection startup GPTZero scanned 25 to 30 recent posts published by the 100 most popular newsletters on Substack to see whether they contained AI-generated content. It estimated that 10 of the publications likely use AI in some capacity, while seven “significantly rely” on it in their written output. (GPTZero paid for subscriptions to Substack newsletters that are heavily paywalled.) Four of the newsletters that GPTZero identified as using AI extensively confirmed to WIRED that artificial intelligence tools are part of their writing process, while the remaining three did not respond to requests for comment.
Many of the newsletters GPTZero flagged as publishing AI-generated writing focus on sharing investment news and personal finance advice. While no AI-detection service is perfect—many, including GPTZero, can produce false positives—the analysis suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are now regularly consuming AI-generated or AI-assisted content that they are specifically subscribing to read. In some cases, they’re even paying for it.
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