The Level of Inauthenticity on Substack is Out of Control

I'm going to be say what many of your are thinking - I don't like AI generated content.

The best compliment I’ve gotten on Substack is from someone who has turned into a dear friend. She called me a truth teller. I called out some shit, and I ended up with a great friend. So it was a win-win for me. By the end of this post, I don’t know if I will lose friends or gain more – neither is the objective. I’m just frustrated that something I discovered and thought was the antidote to the decay on other social media platforms is now becoming infected with the very poison.

This is not an AI bashing post. I love AI and I’m a huge advocate of it. So let’s not go there.

If you’re anything like me, your recent Substack feed must be triggering. It started right around the holidays and catapulted into the New Year with Fire Horse energy. I cannot scroll without seeing articles like – How to Grow Your Subscribers in 90 Days, How to Make $10K in a Month while working 3 hours a week, I just started and already have xxx # of subscribers in only x weeks. As if those weren’t bad enough, the new ones (and they pop up a mile a minute) are the million How to Use AI templates to automate your Substack. Oh My God – Stop the Madness! I can’t fucking take it anymore.

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

I’ve spoken to many a Substack friend, and we all feel the same way. My next sentence will be controversial, so read it at your own risk. I love AI, but AI should NOT replace the voice of a writer. I don’t mind using AI to do spell and grammar checks. I’m guilty of said usage. I’m livid about using AI to write your content. Just today, I read about tools created to pretty much be you on Substack. Hey, I get it — we all have limiting time frames, and we all have busy schedules – but to me this is a prime example of wanting your cake and eating it too. You want the presence but you don’t want to do the work. You want the followers but you don’t want to find them, you want to publish content but you don’t want to put soul into it. When we start using AI to drop scheduled notes and generate responses to other people’s work - guess what? THAT IS INAUTHENTIC AS FUCK!!!! Stop it!!!

It is not fair to those of us who spend our time crafting a note or a post, just so your bot can automate some generic response based on its historical knowledge of your work. How can we make genuine connections if you’re not willing to actually think? If you’re selling something, I’m sorry I won’t trust you enough to buy it. Trust is earned, and built upon. So we all came here to follow a dream - have the decency to level set the playing field.

Substack was a place where writers could unite, create, and share their work. What happens when we all start using AI to tell our stories or write about our perspectives? How different is this from Instagram or Twitter or whatever social media platform you chose to run from? You know how Insta now has pictures and videos where you can’t tell what is real and what is fake — this is what you’re doing here. There is an assumption that readers can’t spot what is human content versus AI content, I admit it’s getting harder to discern, but it’s not impossible to identify. I notice them - the notes that churn out the same thing in different words. If you’ve read about what “templates” work, you can often spot the pattern when one is being used. The next level blows my mind — a perfectly crafted essay, almost too perfect. Enthused readers identify and comment, only to be met with a response from the author that seems highly mismatched from the content they wrote. Stop preying on the emotions of others.

In a way, I’m not entirely opposed to Substack lives anymore, because now we can see who is real and who isn’t. You don’t need to be polished and professional — but I’ll damn well be able to tell if you wrote that perfect article and now you can’t speak to it. The jig is up.

The world doesn’t need another perfectly optimized content machine. It needs you — unfiltered, unscheduled, a little bit of a mess. If you recognized yourself in any of this, you already know what to do. Go write something real.