Some of Substack's Biggest Writers Rely On AI Writing Tools

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.