A note on Unreported Truths and AI-written stories

Some Substackers use AI engines to stuff your inboxes with spammy, promotional posts. I will NEVER use artificial intelligence to write pieces. I believe my work is unique and doing so cheats you.

I’m not sure yet whether and how AI will change society. (Apple scientists just posted a fascinating paper suggesting the current engines cannot solve truly novel puzzles. More on that soon.)

But AI is changing Substack in a way I don’t like.

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(Support real, human-generated content. For barely 15 cents a day.)

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Substack is at its core an email delivery system. It’s become many other things too, but it began as a newsletter service with a payment engine bundled.

At other mailing systems like MailChimp, users sign up for monthly plans that limit how many emails they can send.¹ In contrast, Substack charges writers a flat 10 percent of subscription fees, no matter how big either the paid or free lists get. And, crucially, it does not restrict how many posts a writer can make.² In this way, it’s more like a “traditional” social media outlet like X, pushing engagement and time on site.

Now we come to AI.

Intentionally or not, the Substack model now encourages quasi-spam farming for subscribers.

In other words, unscrupulous writers can add emails to their Stacks (sometimes without the explicit consent of the person whose email is added). Then those writers send them emails that are paywalled as bait to get them to convert. The emails contain a couple of lines, followed by this lure:

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The reason AI-generated content works so well for this bait is because it is so easy to create. If you’re one of these charlatans, you don’t care if you lose free readers, you just want to convert as many as you can, and stuffing inboxes is the best way to do so.

The saddest part is that it doesn’t even matter if readers wind up disappointed with the content they’ve “upgraded” to see. Only some will bother to downgrade. Your churn — the number of subscribers you lose each month — will be high. But if you are aggressive enough, you’ll add enough to keep growing anyway.

This isn’t journalism, it’s marketing, a subscription-driven version of the “listicles” that Buzzfeed once made famous.

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I am incredibly lucky.

I joined Substack early and managed to build a large audience quickly despite the censorship I faced on Twitter. I didn’t have to play any of these games. I just wrote, and you found me, and you came with me. I don’t like paywalls, I want everyone to be able to read my articles, and I have mainly been able to avoid them.³

Unreported Truths is a community now, a big one, city-sized. When I was thinking about moving Unreported Truths to Rumble two years ago, I asked your opinion. You discouraged me, and I agreed. When I want to know about AI, or anything specialized, I ask you — and I trust the answers I get. (Though I still verify them.)

And I care about what we have built here.

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(And here’s where I ask you: do you care about we have built here enough to pay for it?)

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So I promise you three things:

1: I will write when what I have to say will be meaningful because I have an opinion or facts (or both!) you haven’t heard.

That doesn’t happen on a set schedule. It might be every day one week, three times the next. If I’m working on a bigger project, it might be once in a month (though if that happens I will try to let you know).

2: I will not use AI to compose my articles — not for first drafts, not for finished articles, not for anything. If I can’t stay ahead of the engines, I’ll quit.

I have a half-dozen articles I want to write at this moment, more than I can comfortably put out in the next few days. That’s good. It means I’ll have to decide which matters most. It means I’ll have to write quickly and well - without subcontracting my brain to ChatGPT.

3: The corollary of 1 and 2: I will not fill your boxes with spammy paywalled AI-generated content to try to upsell you. It’s junk food, empty calories. You deserve better.

Onward.

1. For smaller, infrequent users, services like MailChimp pay as you go plans.

2. I suppose it is possible that someone who sent - say - 50 posts a day might run into pushback, but I have never heard anyone complain about this.

3. Though I have grown to like the paywall for articles more than a year old, that’s a small perk subscribers deserve.