Farewell letter to Substack

Full disclosure, I decided to just copy/paste this post in it’s “rough draft” form straight from my AI transcription program. :) In case there are any lingering questions about who wrote this. It’s me, in all my unedited glory. LOL!

Okay, so I just tested Substack’s new, um, AI detection tool on a post I wrote about my grandma who just passed away, and it said it was 100% AI. So I just want you to know that I don’t think the tool is very accurate, since the story about my grandma (who isn’t actually my grandma, by the way and it says so in the text.) She was a very kind woman who looked after me when we were kids and treated me like a grandkid. I was her grandchild by heart, and she just passed away. I can’t tell you how upset was to find out that, for whatever reason, the app thinks that was AI-generated. So what I wanted to do is tell my audience exactly how I use AI, and then I’m going to disable the ability for this new software to scan my content for AI, for two reasons. One, Substack, with that scanning tool, I don’t believe that Substack is safe for writers anymore. I think what they just did was they invited an AI into the room to scan all of our creative work, right, and then train their model with it. That’s what just happened. Substack basically handed over…I’m actually, um, I’m going to stop posting on Substack over it because I’m so upset about it. And not because I’m saying I’m mad. I’m not mad. I’m not overreacting. I’m saying that I originally got onto Substack because I am a creative writer, and I wanted a safe space to connect with other writers. As soon as they turned it into a social media feed—which they did—I was already getting skeptical about it, and I was questioning my life choices at that point. Why? Because the minute Facebook went and turned itself into a social media feed, as long as you can get an account for free and they want everyone to join, when they start talking about that, the next thing that’s coming after that is selling advertising spots. They haven’t done it yet, and the reason is because they built a business model on subscriptions. So as long as—but do you see where we’re going with this? So now this free, safe space for writers to be creative and find their tribe has already turned into a content machine that is—anyway. So all I’m going to say is: thank you, Substack. You have just given me one good reason, excellent reason, not to continue producing to. You know, I mean, Substack was honestly an addition to my blog that already exists on my website. And on my blog, it’s my rules, it’s my audience, it’s my SEO, it’s my business, it’s my exposure and my visibility that we’re playing with. I’m not—whenever I’m on someone else’s platform, by nature of being on there, I’m promoting their platform. So it wasn’t a great SEO move for me in the first place, just going to be honest with you, Substack. But now that you have—you are literally paying an AI to train itself on my content, and I’m quite upset with that because, A, you didn’t ask me first, and B, you didn’t ask me first. So from a—just from a standpoint of consent, I am moving off of Substack effective immediately, which means I’m going to be exporting my client list, putting them into my mass mailer system, and paying them instead of you to hold my audience. So congratulations, Substack, you have just lost a writer. Also, I mean, like, what big deal? I’ve got 86 followers so far. No big deal. This is not a big deal to Substack. Substack—but the other reason I’m offended is because I did write that post, and it said it was 100% created by AI. It was not 100% created by AI. In fact, AI had very little to do with it. I started off with a voice note, which is what I’m doing now for this post. By the time you see it, it’ll be in the written form. But I literally have a record button turned on while I dictate the entire post into an AI so it can transcribe it for me. Why? Because I create better out loud than I do when I start typing on a keyboard. I start editing myself. And so it isn’t really my voice anymore, because I’m trying to make it sound like what I think you want it to sound like, instead of just being myself. So I use a voice transcription service. Well, as you probably have already suspected, the way we speak isn’t the way we—isn’t considered good writing. And so I do have AI clean it up a little bit for grammar, but it is still my intellectual property that we’re dealing with here. It’s my thoughts and my words. Okay? So no matter how much you tell me AI has removed my humanness, I actually have never had a problem with a bot removing my humanness from my content. I have routinely had problems with other humans removing my humanness so they can turn me into a victim or a client or neither, without my permission. So that is what’s happening here. I’m really sorry. Substack, this is a very hard thing to say, but it was beautiful while it lasted. But it’s time for you to go now. You promised a bunch of creative people that this would be a safe haven from political debates, that it would be a safe haven from bots, that it would be a safe haven from unethical business practices, and now you are literally paying someone to train itself on my content without my permission. So this is goodbye. I hope to not see you again. Thank you.

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