Substack’s Uncanny Valley?

General
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I have subscribed to a few Substack newsletters for a while and wanted to read a paywalled article which lured me into a “free read” by downloading the Substack app (what’s the worst that could happen?! :face_with_diagonal_mouth:) Of course a week later I find myself scrolling incessantly in the app, jumping from interesting note to interesting newsletter and feeling very…burned out?

Everything it serves me seems compelling and like it’s striking a nerve of something I want to read and I can relate to, but there is nothing to take away from it. It’s like empty calories, nothing makes me feel full, yet I feel like there is something I should be taking away from it? Something to be doing, being? And so of course I keep scrolling.

Then it occurred to me: these are all being mostly written by AI? I mean, duh Jenna. That’s likely. That’s why they mostly sound the same and vaguely content-less. But the start, the kernel that they were created from, was likely a very human feeling, and THAT is the thing I want to relate to.

I don’t really have a conclusion here other than to name the thing and ask if others have experienced this? It is incredibly disorienting and exhausting and as a person who consciously does not swim in the deep end of social media, it surprised me how quickly and strongly I was pulled in.

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I can’t say I’ve noticed this, but I also can’t say I’m surprised. (FWIW I never use the Substack app – I find it too off the mark for what I’m looking for. I don’t want social media, which it pushes so hard, I want good content.)

The one thing I can say about the various sources I pay attention to is that most are people. Often, people I’ve met or interacted with somehow, and often people I’ve followed from platform to platform as winds have changed. Given your observation, I’ll probably spend a little more time vetting new sources as I encounter them. Some slow, weird, researchy thing. A not very automated process to tell computers and humans apart. (NVAPTCHA?)

-Leo

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Agreed, the Substack newsletters I subscribed to were for people I had known somewhere else, either by podcast or older blog that migrated to Substack, etc. I don’t doubt these new accounts I’m being served on the app have actual people behind them (at least most of them). It’s just that the writing seems to be very AI-influenced/edited. It’s like I can picture the writers saying to an LLM, “Here is this feeling I have, let’s write about it.” And an LLM saying “here’s what I think you mean.” And then we end up with the product of that, which has at its core a compelling thought, but is reflected back in a way that doesn’t really say anything?

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I was subscribed to several newsletters for a while, not all of them on Substack, and maybe at that time AI wasn’t as visible or as common. Still, I already felt something similar: they didn’t give me much, but somehow created this urge to keep reading them, even if they weren’t particularly enjoyable or useful.

Over time, I realized that almost everything that truly stayed with me came from books. I ended up unsubscribing from all of them. Now I only follow one, from someone I already knew from another platform.

Even so, when I go in, the same thing happens: I stay longer than I’d like. So I try to tilt the balance toward creating, making, and leaving reading for more specific moments, like in the morning.

As for AI, it’s starting to feel a bit strange. Reading Italo Calvino, I noticed structures that we now often associate with generated text, but clearly aren’t. In the end, AI is trained on human language, so those echoes make sense.

What I do feel is that structure starts to weigh too much. As if words were a malleable material, but the form were fixed. You can change the tone, the subject, even the intention, but if the “bottle” is the same, everything ends up looking alike.

It’s like making a love story or a war film using the same resources: the same lighting, the same framing, the same editing rhythm, the same types of shots, the same music, the same acting. Even if the story changes, the feeling stays the same.

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Such a good point, and I think that Substack is its own very specific bottle.

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I don’t necessarily have a problem reading AI generated work - but it needs to be good. And a lot of what I’m reading on Substack is pure slop, all the way down. It’s like people don’t even edit their output. I think it’s partly a skill issue. If you’re not smart enough // skilled enough to write good prose, you’ll think any old prose is good prose and publish it…

That said, Substack certainly has a kind of…faux elevated semi-academic book club snootery going on that I find a little absurd. Folks who genuinely seem to think the Stack is a literary movement. Really just another platform, and another platform, all the way down.

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