Yes, I use AI. No, I don't want Substack screening for it.

As there is so much discussion out there right now about Substack’s newly launched AI screener, I really wanted to chip in with my own two cents.

As you know, I use AI, and I even have another publication here (Level Up with AI) which is all about how to use AI systems and automations to make your life as a writer and creative easier.

So you’d think I’d be first in line for a tool that sorts the real writers from the slop. I’m not. Three things keep nagging at me.

I use AI to help me in my processes. The stories, the numbers, the experience all comes from me, my own head. But my AI squad supports me in putting it down in words. Apparently good enough to be a 100% human text. Please note that I do edit it myself again afterwards. If you want access to my AI helpers, get them here:

I want these AI helpers

The detector punishes people who learned English second

This is the one that bothers me most.

Researchers at Stanford ran a batch of essays written by non-native English speakers through seven different AI detectors. The detectors flagged more than half of them as AI-generated. The essays were written by actual humans. Their only crime was a smaller vocabulary and simpler sentence patterns, which is exactly what you get when you’re writing in a language you learned as an adult.

As English is my second language too, I know how you can just tell that somebody has a smaller vocabulary than a native speaker would have.

I don’t want Substack to become Medium

I wasn’t on Medium for long, but long enough to realise the changes they have made in terms of being really strict when it comes to AI writing. So much that all the big writers decided to leave because it also flagged human-written things as AI, and everybody just seemed to suffer. Now I feel like Medium is no longer actually a platform that writers want to be on.

I don’t love where the writing goes

To score your post, the detector has to read your post. Every piece you write gets passed through an outside company’s model before it reaches a single reader.

Maybe that’s nothing. But I spent years learning to write in my own voice, and handing all of it to a system built to grade it sits wrong with me. I’d rather you be the judge of whether my writing is worth your time. You’re better at it than any model.

You can love it or hate it, but the point is AI is here to stay, and so is probably the AI screening.

And to some degree, I can understand why they are doing it. They want to prevent that Substack turns into another LinkedIn, which is the other extreme, where simply one AI bot is talking to another AI bot.

For my newsletter, it will always be like this: the ideas come from me, the brainstorming comes from me. It’s my data, my numbers, my life experience, and stories that I share. That’s how I started this newsletter, and this is how I will continue running it.

Will I continue using my own created AI skills? Hell yeah.

And if you want to, you can too.