Part Of The Process: AI Insights From Substack And Its Independent Publishers

Beyond being a publishing success story all its own — with more than five million paying subscriptions and a recent $100 million funding round — Substack’s ecosystem of independent creators publishing directly to their curated audiences provides a particularly unique view of what AI usage looks like. When the line between publisher and audience is so direct and so closely connected, where is AI fitting into the equation?

Substack recently asked that of 2,000 of its publishers, running the gamut from those with “free publications to some earning seven figures.” Ultimately, nearly half (45.4%) said they’re using AI in some capacity.

“Based on our results, a typical AI-using publisher is 45 or over, more likely to be a man, and tends to publish in categories like Technology and Business,” writes Substack’s Arielle Swedback. “He’s not using AI to generate full posts or images. Instead, he’s leaning on it for productivity, research, and to proofread his writing. Most who use AI do so daily or weekly and have been doing so for over six months.”

With 70% of those surveyed running paid newsletters, Substack found no significant correlation regarding AI adoption across revenue levels. Research was the primary use for 64.9%, followed by brainstorming (56.4%), writing assistance (48.7%), and image generation (41.5%).

(Source: Substack)

Whether AI was seen as beneficial or harmful to their work was predictably split along whether those users currently used AI, though both AI-users and non-AI users “voiced concerns about creative skills, plagiarism, and the environmental impacts of AI.” More than half (57.3%) of the publishers using AI say it was extremely or very valuable to their work, and as tools evolve and become more specialized to the specific tasks that creators may need, those numbers and satisfaction-rates are surely only going to rise.

“In all likelihood, the future of AI in the creator space isn’t going to be a binary choice between ‘AI’ and ‘human creativity,’” writes Swedback. “Instead, it will be formed by thousands of individual decisions about which tools serve a publisher’s individual goals and which detract from them.”