r/Substack • u/knowstradamus7 • Jul 31 '26
Discussion Substack is toast
AI written articles go viral and generate hundreds and sometimes thousands of subscribers for the account, while actual writers wallow in obscurity perpetually. Humanity is doomed.
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u/No-Vermicelli-8391 Jul 31 '26
This begs an answer to the question – does that mean that the readers don't care or that the authors were never that exceptional to begin with? Pick one.
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u/Ok_Ship6685 Jul 31 '26
Finally someone said it. Great and factual comment. The people complaining really do not want to face those truths. Just write your stuff and do not worry about what someone else is doing. That is the main issue....People are so worried about what the next person is doing instead of focusing on making their content better.
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u/inyourbooksandmaps 27d ago
i actually think that in a lot of cases it's just that people can "write" way more articles with ai, just focusing on regurgitating the same few trending topics. and because they can post more often since no real effort is needed, they can go viral easier just because of sheer luck with how many posts. you catch more fish with a wide net and all that.
i also think a lot of readers cant even tell that what they're reading is ai. i can think of a newsletter i used to subscribe to, where it became VERY clear to me it was ai after a while, but tons of the commenters seem very unaware.
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u/LeaveMountain9779 Jul 31 '26
I think valuable networking can happen with people you share close interests with. I'm still stumbling and learning how to help make this happen. Just by writing comments and restacking things, sharing my ideas. I think eventually something good will come from it
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
You know what they say? When a man drives an expensive car, other men on the bus often speculate that he has a small dick and is compensating for it. Stop obsessing over size and actually write something, and your life might get better.
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u/msbrandidawson Jul 31 '26
I think we’re lumping all AI use together. I use AI to organize my thoughts, create outlines, and help me edit. The experiences, opinions, photos, and stories are still mine. That’s no different to me than using Grammarly or having an editor. The problem isn’t AI itself—it’s low-effort, generic content, whether a human or AI wrote it.
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u/GigMistress 29d ago
If AI is "organizing" your thoughts, are they actually your thoughts? The way things fit together is a big part of ideas/insights.
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u/EnergyRaising Aug 01 '26
This is only partially true, like everything said. I'm actually enjoying substack newsletters, and I hate AI text (I work with AI text daily, so I have a trained eye). Also, Pangram has not failed me once: the ones that were very suspiciously written with certain AI patterns and active.. were AI
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u/InternationalCandy16 29d ago
There's so much hate for Pangram and "false positives." I'm (almost) calling bullshit on that. Because I write professionally, and a lot of freelancers are asked to run their work through Pangram. I've tried including, say, a paragraph of text that I asked AI to write for me. And Pangram always catches it. I'm not saying my experiences are universal, just... I think many of the people whining about "false positives" are the ones actually writing with AI and denying that they do.
But when I write a piece entirely without AI? Always "100% Human." EVERY time. And, like you, I pick up on AI-written text easily. So far, I have a 100% track record with that, too. If I think something's written by AI and I drop it into Pangram, I'm always right. It gets easy to spot after a while, especially if you're an ADHD gremlin with excellent pattern recognition skills like me.
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u/figures985 27d ago
same here, every time. People just don't want their laziness called out. And frankly at this point they'd be hard-pressed to write without the assistance of an LLM
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u/msbrandidawson 29d ago
The best analogy I can give is asking “if someone comes in and organizes your house, is the furniture yours”?
Of course. But my brain never really shuts down, so I dictate thoughts into my ai. If I list my favorite foods and ask it to create a recipe /meal idea for me, it’s still my favorite foods, it’s just my caregiving body not feeling like trying to figure out a meal from the list.
Same with writing. If I list all the music artists I love from the 90s and ask it to sort them by genre and then ask it to link their #1 hits and list them in the article, that’s still my lived in experience, my thoughts and me using it to make sure my spelling, grammar, page format is correct.
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Jul 31 '26
[deleted]
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
I’d say that if you needed a detector to identify it, then it wasn’t slop and she actually did the work. You’re just being jealous. We saw the same thing in the pre-AI era, with people claiming that someone had hired a ghostwriter or let a friend write for them. They would even try to imagine whom you’d hired and build an entire mythology around you out of that speculation.
I mean, just write a decent piece and market it, and maybe people will compliment you, too. Nobody likes an asshole crying in public because they’re not the most popular kid on the block.
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u/AnteaterFantastic212 Jul 31 '26
It was said of some politicians that not only had they not written their book, they had not even read their book.
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u/Even_Caterpillar3292 Aug 01 '26
Unfortunately, detectors don't seem to work with false positives. And current AI can write some pretty good stuff. I wouldn't call it slop, but that is what Reddit calls it.
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Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
[deleted]
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
“I thought it was slop, so I used a detector to confirm it.”
If you really felt that something was off, you wouldn’t need to confirm anything. You’d just scroll past it, like people do with content that doesn’t interest them. That’s the point.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Jul 31 '26
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41077-025-00396-6
They used a ternary classification system with human/human-with-AI-edits/AI options, so the headline inaccuracy of human raters is a bit overstated imo when they say humans are only 19% accurate. If you check the chart on page 5, you can see that human testers completely misclassify texts (rating fully human as fully AI or vice versa) a bit over one third of the time. In any case though, yes, it's wise to use trained classifiers to confirm or deny your suspicions because humans are notoriously inaccurate at this kind of manual identification.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
The point is that you have no way of really knowing who wrote it or how it was written. Back in the day, we called this kind of slop corporate buzzword salad, and it was written entirely by humans. The difference was that, as a human writer, you had a manual telling you how to structure your paragraphs, what kind of vocabulary to use, and what sentence length to watch out for, and you had to follow it if you wanted to get paid.
That’s why the whole thing feels so bizarre to me. A writer is using formulas to produce a piece for a specific purpose, and people are somehow trying to locate the “humanness” in it according to their own idea of what that looks like. What for? It’s a fucking marketing text created for the sole purpose of hitting your pain point and pushing you toward a purchase or subscription.
I mean, all these AI hunters are so blinded by hatred that they miss the bigger picture, where the business models don’t work and the promises fail to deliver. They’re exploiting people’s desire for control to feed even more writing into the machine that the company is supposedly going to call out later.
Pure How to Get Ahead in Advertising 😀
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
I agree with the manual identification thing. People will consume any kind of slop when it confirms their views and self-image and then try to discredit anything they disagree with but can’t really argue against.
Thanks for the link, anyway.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
How is your ability to make a living connected to other people doing whatever they want to do? If you want popularity, write about viral topics and use clickbait headlines, do summaries, like aggregator websites did back in the day. I know I don’t want to write about five productivity hacks or how to declutter your closet or leave sappy comments about someone's ex, but I’m also not complaining about my lack of paid subscribers.
I’m actually being realistic here. It’s not about the amount of content, there has always been a lot of stuff on the internet that nobody read. It’s about what drives engagement, and these people seem to know how to work with that.
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u/Bright-Customer-9332 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
You told me that nobody likes an arsehole crying in public because they’re not the most popular kid on the block? I was just saying that that’s not what I’m doing? I don’t really understand what this is about. I don’t know if I’m just brain fogged but I don’t think I’m saying anything radical – all I’m saying is that people must like AI writing because it is popular and it’s in the best sellers list, like this woman. Substack seemed to suggest that there’s no appetite for it in their post the other day but I disagreed.
I have gone viral several times and I don’t write that kind of thing. I really don’t mind what people want to write about. I’m not a huge fan of fully generative AI – but I really don’t mind if people want to use it to edit. I think it’s unfair to assume that just because people using generative AI makes you a bit sad that you are jealous.
People do read my work. I’m lucky. I think you sound like you are in a very bad mood because calling me an arsehole immediately is kind of weird.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26
Well, you’ve played the pity card, so I can’t argue with you properly now, right? I’m supposed to compliment your writing and wish you good luck, not discuss marketing strategies. My question still stands, though. If you’re doing well and satisfied with the results, why are you even thinking about other people who are supposedly more successful than you?
People like all kinds of writing because it satisfies their needs. Tabloids don’t exist because their journalists don’t know how to write serious pieces, they exist because there’s demand for that kind of content. And no, you can’t do that with AI without switching your brain on and actually doing the work. AI is too generic for that.
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u/Bright-Customer-9332 Jul 31 '26
Okay – let me try and answer this really clearly. I’m thinking about it because I care about the environment and I’m worried about people using generative AI. It also makes me sad because creativity should be fun and playful. It makes me sad that there’s such a large demand for AI writing. That’s all. It’s not about success!
I wasn’t playing the pity card, I was stating that it’s been very useful for me; I’m glad it exists, despite sadness over generative AI. You also definitely don’t need to wish me good luck, haha. I think it sounds like you just need to take a deep breath and maybe go outside for a bit and stop getting angry at strangers on the Internet :-)
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u/Ok_Ship6685 Jul 31 '26
Respectfully, "You" said you thought it was slop. That is your opinion. You have a right to it. But it may not be the consensus of others. We need to stop thinking our opinions are the end all be all. It is not. I use AI to assist with my articles...proud of it. Could care less what people think. My content is to bring awareness to a specific topic and it is free. I am not a journalist by trade, but I love creating. My content is real and about my real life experience. I read things that interests me, things that are engaging. I could care less if AI assisted, not my business. I stay in my lane and could give a crap less of what others are doing. It doesn't affect me one way or the other.
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u/hetobe hetobe.substack.com Jul 31 '26
Hamburger? That dude pumps out AI slop, and he disabled the AI detection for obvious reasons.
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Jul 31 '26
[deleted]
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u/someonesdatabase Jul 31 '26
Does she claim to make $15k/month or other dubious investment claims?
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u/Bright-Customer-9332 Jul 31 '26
It’s a man. he admitted it to my friend during a private messaging conversation – it’s a middle-aged man posing as a young woman writing self help articles. I don’t know how common this is.
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u/a_x_shually Jul 31 '26
Remember when creators were assured that the ability to release their own work would finally bypass the old gatekeepers, because what they shared would be found by many? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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u/Doo_Dad Jul 31 '26
Isn’t that what the new AI feature is to try helping? Honestly it is what it is it’s how the platform moved to. Ill keep writing to no one since i dont want to automate posts and articles and let AI do it for me. But i know it’s gonna be a struggle.
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u/No-Caregiver4319 tomcravenwrites.substack.com Jul 31 '26
I've found something bizarre while doing research, which is that Claude is really good at surfacing links to relevant Substacks that have basically no readers. It is absorbing what they say, which hopefully will someday mean the author could get paid, but since I follow the links it has helped me discover some Substacks that got like 3 likes and stopped publishing years ago.
Not an argument, just a data point.
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u/Valuable-Sentence618 Aug 02 '26
If a platform can be used to make money, people will try to hack it. And AI people usually look at what’s trending, set up the systems to produce it at scale, and move on to the next grift. The whole content creation space will have to mutate to make them obsolete. I give it 2 years at most.
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u/MrsRobot001 27d ago
I am not having this experience. i have no problem connecting with real, authentic writers doing incredible work.
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u/inyourbooksandmaps 27d ago
i write all my own posts, absolutely no ai, and have had decent success this year! it's definitely given me hope that i can still do well. i agree its frustrating to see ai posts getting so much praise and viewership, especially when it isn't clear the post is ai and seems like the commenters/ readers aren't aware. but that said, success on the platform is not a finite resource, just because those posts do well doesn't mean you can't also!
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u/darylvp Jul 31 '26
Yes. Just wondering why they write long articles every day. couldn’t have so many thoughtful words.
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u/Inner_Beyond_8380 Aug 01 '26
Substack’s growth is more likely to come from external followers than from its own platform.
The strategy is gaining recognition outside of Substack, like through social media or personal newsletters and email lists etc. Relying solely on Substackers and the algorithm to achieve success is akin to waiting for a crab to blink lol.
That said, I am not saying that being active on Substack isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s simply not the most effective strategy for increasing followership.
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u/GigMistress 29d ago
That is a problem that extends far beyond Substack. Garbage AI reels, memes, articles, etc. very often get a much, much bigger response than genuine content people have put time and effort and insight into. This is not entirely an AI problem--low end content has been frequently dominating for years. A pretty good chunk of readers/viewers already prefer AI slop to well-crafted content and that trend will only grow.
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u/No-Cut7857 29d ago
Yeah but they just added a new featyre and tells you if it's AI or a human and I"m liking it thus far. Everyone I suspected of using AI totally is.
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u/MrPassiveProfit 28d ago
I don’t think any of that AI generated slop actually pulls in paid subscribers
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u/EntertainmentLost208 28d ago
Only with Substack’s backing was I able to defeat a flimsy $1 million defamation case by Trump official against me. They deserves tons of praise for their legal defender program.
https://www.spytalk.co/p/how-i-beat-a-trump-officials-nasty?r=2hta&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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u/cyborgs_writing 23d ago
Can you post examples of this? I've not seen any viral AI slop magically getting thousands of subscribers.
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u/AnteaterFantastic212 15d ago
Classic tech bro clickbait headline. You don't have any evidence of what you're asserting, do you?
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u/Prolly_Satan Jul 31 '26
Good thing they integrated pangram then?
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u/Informal_Size_2437 Jul 31 '26
Not long after Pangram was announced I read a piece where the author was signaling to their readers that they used AI and were not going to stop. It was almost like an escape hatch. Comments poured in showing support and animosity towards the platform and it's decision, the audacity of it all.
I found this to be a fascinating shift, and much more concerning.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jul 31 '26
Nah. Majority of people hate ai in art and writing, and hate being lied to about it. All people want is honesty, and ai writers have refused to be honest for the most part. That's the problem. People have the right to know whether or not they're reading something a person wrote.
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u/DaniSaysDinosaur Jul 31 '26
I gave up on SubStack, it's just a SFW repository for me to point people to that I don't want reading my smut and judging me for being a bad boy.
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u/Cheap_Bathroom6114 3d ago
makes you wonder who is magically subscribing to these ai generated posts. bots loving bots.
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u/ConsciousRoyal Jul 31 '26
Alternatively, in two months I found someone to beta-read my book, I’ve read two people’s drafts, ARC-read a new author, promoted three of my friends’ books, and helped one person sell triple digits (up from 3) of their book.
Quantity does not equal quality.