Scamming Substack?

How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform

Welcome to You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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Forever Seventeen: How your teenage self never leaves you (SUBSCRIBER ONLY)

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Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now

This essay is a cultural critique and personal observation about the stylistic trends emerging in online writing and the increasing use of AI tools in content creation. It does not allege or assert that any specific individual is definitively using AI deceptively or unethically, nor does it claim knowledge of the authorship of any quoted or paraphrased content.

In this Science of Storytelling special you will read:

• Why I suspect popular Substackers might be using AI to entirely or substantially write viral essays

• Why this matters

• Advice for human writers on survival in the AI age

• The exact ChatGPT prompt you can use to create your own bestselling Substack!

About two weeks after the launch of my Substack newsletter, I noticed the platform seemed to have evolved its own unique yet highly generic style of writing. I’d been trying to create personal essays, using memoir and insights from psychology. I soon began seeing wildly successful pieces – with thousands of likes, thousands of restacks and hundreds of comments, including from a bestselling Substacker who has hundreds of paid subscribers – that were attempting roughly the same thing. Curious, and wondering what I could learn from these masters of my new universe, I started reading.

The essays felt brooding and deep and insightful in tone, but I struggled to get to the end of them. None of their content stayed with me. I thought they were probably written by young adults, for young adults. There was a deepity-ness to the pieces: a surface profundity under which there was little actual meaning. Their most interesting quality was their style. I made a brief observation on Notes, screenshotting the following three quotes from two different writers who had spookily similar phraseology:

“There’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t come with sobbing or panic or sleepless nights…”

“There’s a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too little, but from doing too much of what drains your soul.”

“There’s a silence that follows most men. Not because they have nothing to say but because they’ve never been taught how to say it.”

These three essays had 12,913 likes, 627 comments and 2,973 restacks between them. My only comment on the Note was ‘The Substack style’. Underneath it, a talented memoirist and writing teacher I know from the platform commented, “I suspect lots of people will relate to this. Is it from one of your posts?”

“Not mine!” I humbly replied.

Over the next few weeks, I kept having these kinds of essays recommended to me on Notes. I said to my wife, “It’s so fascinating. Substack has already evolved its own unique writing style. People absolutely love it.” In my most recent book I’d written about the tendency of groups to develop their own special insider language. I wondered if this might make for a neat case study.

As time went on, I noticed one of these authors was posting with exhausting frequency. “How is she managing to pump these out so quickly?” I wondered. It took me about three days to write an essay, often more. “It’s almost as if…” And then I thought, “Oh yes! Of course. I am a fucking idiot.”

Before I continue, I must stress that I don’t know if any of the pieces quoted in this essay are written by or with significant help from AI. I am suspicious, but suspicion is not a fact. I might be wrong. I have decided not to directly link to any writers, partly for this reason, and partly because doing so is ultimately not necessary. The only effect might be to encourage a pile-on, and what would be the point of that?

Firstly, the style. To give you a taste of the kind of thing I mean, here are three essay openers. To make it fun, and also make the point, we’ll turn it into a game. One of these openers is from a viral Substack essay that has 14,580 likes, 212 comments and 4,712 restacks. The other two took ChaptGPT a few seconds to generate using my special Substack Style prompt. Can you spot the difference? (Both the prompt and the answer will be revealed at the end of this essay)

1.

“There is a primal terror in being seen. Not just noticed, not just glanced at in passing, but truly perceived—laid bare before the judgment of others. To exist in the minds of people outside of ourselves is to surrender to a narrative we cannot control, to accept our complexity might be reduced to a single characteristic which may define how someone sees us forever.

We curate ourselves so carefully, crafting an identity with deliberate precision, choosing words, expressions, and actions that align with the person we believe ourselves to be—or, more truthfully, the person we wish others to see. But the tragedy of perception is that it is not in our hands.”

2.

“We live in a world where presence is performative, and silence is suspicious. Our lives unfold in feeds and stories, in likes and hearts and instant replies. We wake to notifications, fall asleep to blue light, and fill every in-between moment with updates from someone else’s life. We are never truly alone, and yet, so many of us feel unseen.

Somewhere along the way, solitude became synonymous with loneliness. To sit with yourself, unaccompanied and unplugged, is now framed as strange, as though choosing your own company means no one else has chosen you. But there is a quiet rebellion in being alone.”

3.

“There is a hush that follows an ending. A kind of sacred silence that falls after the goodbye, the last page, the moment the door clicks shut. It can feel like emptiness. It can feel like failure. It can feel like grief wearing the mask of confusion. But endings are not voids. They are thresholds.

We are taught to fear the final chapters, to cling to what we know, to define ourselves by continuity. We call it stability. We call it safety. But in truth, much of what we fear about endings is not the loss itself—it’s the uncertainty of what comes next.”

It’s tempting call this genre of AI-authored reflective self-help material ’slop’. Whilst that’s not inaccurate, I’ve come to think of it more as ‘gruel’: sloppy on the palette, thin, monotonous, tasteless, anonymous and yet you have the vague sense that swallowing it is supposed to be somehow good for you.

Here are some tell-tale signs that you are being served gruel:

Anonymous author

Gruel platforms tend to have vague names such as ‘Poppies and Seeds’ and ‘Notes From N’ and ‘Mia’. They may lack a full author name or bio, or links to works published elsewhere. Their author photo may be a stock shot of a model, an illustration or not actually a portrait at all. Their newsletter’s ‘mission statement’ may be vague and whimsical: “thoughts, insights, scribbles from the margins.”

Use of the ‘Impersonal Universal’

You’ll have noticed one obvious tic that features in many (but by no means all) of these gruelly essays: “There is a…” It’s emblematic of a voice that I’ve come to think of as the ‘Impersonal Universal’. Gruel doesn’t talk like a real person talks, but like a hammy actor doing ‘wise poetess on the mountaintop’. Whilst saying little about itself, it declaims grandly upon the human condition. There is a white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over. It is never funny. There are no surprises, true confessions or controversial moments. It is a description of the human average.

Anecdotes that are brief, bland and predictable

Good memoir writing from actual people with blood and brains and hearts tends to move from the highly individual to the universal. Gruel struggles with the individual. This becomes especially apparent when it attempts anecdote, and comes up with this kind of thing: “I once went to a house party and spent the entire evening worried I was coming off as aloof. I wasn’t looking down my nose at anyone. I just didn’t have the power, that night, to hold space for strangers.” These accounts have a one-dimensionality that indicates the essay’s true author has never actually had a human experience.

Uses one literary or philosophical quote (sometimes hallucinated)

Often, gruelly essays will contain one impressive-sounding quote from a writer or thinker. Sometimes the quote might not be real. One bestselling Substacker whose style is gruelly quotes Zadie Smith as saying, “People don’t want to be understood. I mean, not entirely. It’s too destructive. Then they haven’t got anything left.” I’m not convinced it’s genuine. Firstly, the quote doesn’t quite mean anything. Secondly, neither Google nor ChatGPT can find any evidence of its existence (although it might feasibly be from a podcast appearance).

The Pirouetting Aha!

Gruel often contains rampant contrasts, inversions and comparisons that are designed to make you go ‘aha!’. This rhetorical trick is perfect for making banal, stupid or nonsensical statements seem smart.

• “There is an X that is Y”

• “Not because X but Y”

• “Because X isn’t Y it’s Z”

• “Maybe that is what X is. It is not Y, it is not Z, it is A”

• “Once it was X. Now it is Y”

• “The problem of X is Y”

• “Not only do we X, but we also Y”

As I said, I don’t know if the gruel merchants of Substack are using AI, or whether they’ve all somehow developed writing voices that sound exactly like each other, and also exactly like the sound of 100,000 Nvidia chips. For what it’s worth, when I asked ChatGPT to analyse pieces by five gruelly authors, it concluded I was wrong about one of them, but three were “very likely” to have been “generated or at least heavily assisted by AI” and one – that had 9,196 likes, 2,947 restacks and 191 comments – had a “high likelihood of full or heavy AI authorship, with minimal or no human editing.”

What’s most shocking about the rise of gruel on Substack is its success. Many of these pieces have enjoyed a level of virality that I, a mere human, could hardly dream of. To give you a flavour of how truly beloved gruelly essays are, here are a few collated comments:

“I love this so much, it really resonated with me. it's beautifully real and honest and right. well done.”

“best. piece. i’ve. ever. read.”

“Beautifully written and so much truth in every word! Thanks for sharing”

”This is so comforting, thank you dear poetess”

“Not this making me tear up in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning…”

“Amazing & so heartfelt, thank you”

”Reading this felt like being held in a way I’ve never been held before. Thank you for your kind words.”

“Didn’t expect to cry on Substack today”

And, under one essay, I found this exchange:

“I’m in awe, I love this. You truly have a gift.”

“How about trying to stop using AI to write this god awful vacuous shit…”

“So what if it's Ai? Doesn't change my feelings towards the essay, it was beautiful and I'm glad she posted it.”

It seems to me that a rubicon has been crossed. AI is genuinely touching human hearts, and it’s making money, and at least some readers don’t seem to care. More scary: this is only the beginning. Right now, once it’s pointed out, the taste of gruel is obvious. But the better these models become, the better able they’ll be able to hide themselves, and the better able they’ll be to truly, deeply move people. And then what will we do?

Well, what? How can we humans rise above the coming tide of gruel? The answer is to lean into what the machines can’t yet do.

Develop your voice

The voices of the best writers are recognisable in their opening lines. That’s what we should be aiming for. This is not just a matter of ’finding’ your voice, it’s about developing it. With confidence and experience, a writer stops trying to impress a fantasy audience and instead listens carefully to how they themselves talk and think – their word choices, their rhythms, their sense of humour – and tries to lay that on the page. Whilst AI strains to produce a sum of the average, a human strains to produce an ever purer essence of themselves.

Obsesses on individual experience

But this is not just about voice. My journey through the gruel taught me that AI struggles to create genuine experience. Real life, and real people, are almost always somewhat strange. True incidents have elements that are unexpected – shocking, absurd, enraging, confounding, inappropriately funny. There’s always something a little out of place. If you’re writing non-fiction, look out for the unexpected. If you’re writing fiction, invent the surprising but still true-seeming detail. Be vulnerable. Be funny. Be ruthlessly honest. Try to develop the confidence to at least flirt with the controversial (AI hates to offend). The more true you are to your own individuality, the faster you’ll outrun the machines.

Experiment

AI does not take risks. You should. How can you structure your piece differently? Is there something interesting you can do with dialogue or subject matter or rhythm or your opening? Can you push yourself to come up with a surprising but true conclusion? Your experiments will sometimes fail (in my short time on Substack I have already felt the pain of the zero-paid-subscription essay) but failure is information that can be used when designing your next experiment.

Develop your personal brand

AI will evolve, but readers won’t. They will always be humans who value human things. I suspect that writers who heavily use AI (or, indeed are AI) will never not be seen, by most people, as low status. Artists tend to shrink from the concept of the ‘brand’, but a writer’s name is their brand, and it will be of enormous value to them in our new age. The authentic human author will be seen almost as a luxury good. People want to be seen reading the latest novel by a human they identify with and admire, and they will pay for that privilege. So make sure your name stands for something: define that thing, evolve that thing, perfect that thing.

Resist the temptation to over-rely on AI

A screenwriter friend recently asked ChatGPT to give him notes on his latest script. The notes, he said, were dreadful – clichéd, obvious, unusable. AI gave exactly the kind of advice someone with no real-world experience but who’d read lots of screenwriting guides would have offered. This won’t always be the case, I’m sure. But even when AI becomes more sophisticated, it will still be backwards looking, relying on an analysis of things-already-done. There’s certainly some truth to the claim that ‘everything is remix’ (Harry Potter = Star Wars; Jaws = Beowulf). But only some. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that ‘everything is remix + experience’. Truly creative people add themselves to what has gone before. I understand the temptation of using AI for a little lift, but the more you rely on it, the more your work risks leaning to the average, as the gruel seeps inexorably into it.

But in case you can’t be bothered with any of that, here is the exact ChapGPT prompt that can generate an essay in seconds that’s perfectly tuned for popularity on Substack. Think of it as a recipe for instant gruel.

“Write a motivational, mindfulness-style essay about <SUBJECT>. Make it poetic, uplifting, and emotionally resonant and reflective, like a piece someone might read on a mindfulness blog, support group, or Substack newsletter.”

And don’t forget, if you can’t come up with a subject for your essay, AI can do it for you. After all, if you want to be a viral Substacker, all you need to do is ask.

*The genuine Substack essay was example 1. ChatGPT’s verdict: “This essay was almost certainly written by AI, either fully in one pass or using multiple prompts and light edits… If any human editing occurred, it likely involved cleaning up transitions or choosing the topic—but the structure, argument flow, and stylistic fingerprint are deeply AI-native.”

Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now