The Subslop Epidemic (Why AI is Ruining Substack)
Nobody wants this epidemic of fake engagement, so what’s going on there?
You know exactly who I’m talking about.
You spend hours staring at a blinking cursor, doing the hard work of dragging an idea out of your head. You edit, you polish, and finally, you hit publish.
Exactly 1.4 seconds later, you get a notification. A comment! Already?! It’s from someone named ThoughtfulCreator_88 and it reads:
“Wow, this really hit! The line you wrote about [INSERT TOPIC] really got me. Such an insightful perspective!”
That comment was written by a piece of code operating out of a damp server farm in New Jersey. It has all the emotional authenticity of a guy hiring a raccoon wearing a trench coat to go on a first date for him. (”Hello human woman, I am enjoying this spaghetti. Do you have any garbage I could rifle through later?”)
It’s exhausting. We came to Substack because it represents the last great neighborhood on the internet. It’s a sanctuary from traditional social media optimized for constant dopamine hits. The promise here was real community.
And that community still exists. I have followed Benjamin Antoine since I started out. Last year he posted a picture of a coffee. Turns out we both go to the same coffee shop. I reached out, and we met up.
Substack is not very big in Germany, so the chances of this happening were incredibly small. Meeting people in real life through an online community reminded me that Substack is really a special place. But right now Substack is under attack.
Last week we went for a nice walk through a park and exchanged some ideas. We realized we were both dealing with the exact same frustrating experience: our comment sections and feeds are getting hijacked by bots and engagement farmers. Funnily enough, the exact same guys spamming my section were spamming his.
If you look at your feed you might conclude that this is normal. But if you talk to other creators you realize that everyone is just annoyed by it.
“Describe your Substack in 5 words 🤍”
“Write scared. Publish anyway.“
“Love this 🔥🔥🔥”
“This hit hard!”
There’s a word for this now: Subslop.
The saddest part is that this slop is destroying the culture of Substack. It makes it hard to see who is actually real. I don’t want to interact with a bot. If I need 10 minutes just sifting through the comment section to find out who is real, I might stop replying altogether.
We are slowly being conditioned to accept this epidemic of fake engagement as the cost of doing business online. But that’s just the visible part. The same logic is quietly working its way into your drafts. Because suddenly we are writing paragraphs we didn’t think… or believe in.
The Multi-Billion-Dollar Lie
I talked to several Substack creators in the last couple of weeks. There is a weird pattern I recognized: as AI supposedly becomes better, I see more and more creators using AI less.
Contrast that with the most popular narrative on the internet right now. It seems like AI can do anything. Just think your thoughts and AI will create it for you.
Look at the most valuable companies in the world. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta committed $650 billion to AI this year. Yes, billions with a B. OpenAI is still far from being profitable, so it would be an understatement to say they have a massive financial interest in making you believe you need AI. They also have the marketing budget to pull it off. So it’s no surprise that you feel like you are falling behind if you aren’t using the latest model.
Big Tech is pushing for AI adoption. But as more people use AI it actually puts you at a disadvantage.
Objectively AI is not as smart as it seems. It’s just very good at pretending. At the core, an LLM learns patterns from huge data sets and estimates what the most probable next word should be given the context.
But here is the danger of “probable.” In writing, the most probable next word is also the most predictable next word. It is a cliché.
AI is non-deterministic which means you can run the same prompt several times and always get a different result. But look closely. After doing this for a dozen or so times you will see pattern emerge. The model will revolve around a certain idea. That means anyone using a similar prompt will get a similar result.1
The models tend to reproduce the most common patterns rather than invent an original, unusual point of view. Many users ask for the same things: “make this better,” “write a post,” “give me 10 ideas,” which pushes outputs toward the average of the internet.2
Using AI will give you average results and nobody is interested in average.
But it gets worse…
It’s not a… It’s a… Sea of Sameness
We are consuming so much AI-generated text that we are subconsciously adopting its empty, corporate style in our own writing, muddying the waters even further.
It’s not that AI sounds like humans. It’s humans sounding like AI.
Damn it. The use of the ”It’s not… it’s…” is so pervasive that I started using it myself. I can feel how I adopted some of the AI patterns… and it’s really hard to become aware of that.
That’s why we are drowning in a sea of sameness. As more people use AI, content becomes uniform in structure, tone, and visuals. Research suggests that while AI can raise collective diversity in some settings, it does not increase individual creativity.3
The ease of creating content with one click further intensifies competition and the struggle for visibility. Standing out becomes incredibly difficult. This will create a premium for human judgement and creativity.
The Death of the Creator
We call ourselves creators. This strikes me as funny. Most people in the creator economy are anything but creative. The word “Creator” used to imply divinity. Now it’s a job title on LinkedIn.
We are drowning in content and starving for art.
The creator economy is not devoid of creativity. The incentives are just set wrong. So, instead of creating something meaningful, most creators end up spamming the ecosystem just to inflate our subscriber counts.
And here is the uncomfortable part. I have done this. You have probably done this. It's not a moral failing. The temptation to produce something that performs rather than something that matters is a rational response to a system that rewards performance over truth.
The truth is, creativity is hard. It means you have to sit down and you might stare out of the window for an hour. Thinking deeply looks like doing nothing, but it requires intense mental effort. Because humans are naturally lazy, we retreat to using AI. You throw some half-baked ideas into a prompt, and boom, a couple of seconds later you have a flawless article.
Don’t get me wrong. AI is not the problem. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t use AI4.
The real problem is that we have become so obsessed with “providing value” and optimizing for the algorithm that we forgot what it actually means to be creative. We trade our unique perspectives for bulleted lists and actionable takeaways because they perform better. We use AI as a crutch.
“Providing value” is transactional. It’s giving someone 5 steps to fix their morning routine or 10 templates for better emails. And if your only goal is to provide transactional value, you will eventually be replaced by AI, because AI can regurgitate value all day long.
The whole process for original thinking is gone. The work loses its soul.
The Alchemy of Lived Experience
AI can create but it can’t do the noticing. It can’t walk through the park, smell some flowers or jump into a cold lake on a sunny day. Going through a regular day, you feel hundreds of emotions. AI can’t feel any of it. It has no lived experience. And the lived experience is what makes us unique. It’s the foundation of creating art.
AI doesn’t get that.
Every time I use AI to edit an article, it wants to throw out my personal stories or the parts that make the article different (especially the weird phrasing that comes from me not being a native speaker).
When we look at a painting or read an essay, we are ultimately looking for a shared human experience that makes us feel understood and connected.
The personal is what makes art matter. AI can mimic the structure of art, but the reason we seek out our favorite creator is to connect with their unique, human experience.
When we do the hard work of creativity and sit down to stare at a blank page for an hour you apply pressure. It takes your ideas, emotions and lived experiences and transmutes them into a unique point of view. That’s alchemy.
It takes the mundane lead of everyday life and puts it under enough internal pressure to turn it into gold.
Don’t confuse this internal pressure with the external pressure to create more and be more productive. This hurts the creative process because it doesn’t allow you to look deeply enough. That’s what philosophers and artists of the past did. They spent hours just thinking. Imagine that for a moment. Hours of undistracted thinking.
Do the Hard Work
We have a romantic idea that creativity strikes like lightning. That the right idea will arrive fully formed and we just have to capture it.
It doesn't work like that. Ask anyone who has actually made something.
The Renaissance painters didn't wait for inspiration. Michelangelo spent four years on his back painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Da Vinci spent three years on the Mona Lisa. He stepped away from the canvas to live, to observe, and to let his experiences refine his technique. That is devotion. They committed to the work regardless of how they felt.
The difference between a hobby and a life’s work is what you do when you feel absolutely nothing.
If you want to build a creative business, devotion is essential. When the page is blank and you have nothing to say, you sit down anyway, because the work is really about who you are becoming.
So, just start. Don’t lean back waiting for the muse (or ChatGPT) to save you. Lean into the page. Write as many ideas as fast and aggressively as you can. Just get a really crappy draft out of your head.
Commit to writing for three hours. You know you’re gonna blow the first 20 minutes (or more) staring at the wall or thinking about the series you saw on Netflix. But those remaining hours are where the magic happens.
You will hit a wall. You will feel the overwhelming, modern temptation to open a new tab, take a half-baked idea and throw it into an AI, and let a machine finish your thought.
Don’t do it.
That friction is where your creativity lies. Wrestling with the right word, pacing the room, and deleting a paragraph three times because it doesn't sound quite like you. Every time you choose to push through that block instead of outsourcing it to a LLM or template, you are finding out what you actually think.
By embracing creativity you vote for a more human internet. You are rebelling against the Subslop. We came here because we were starving for something real. That’s worth protecting. The culture is only as good as what we choose to engage with.
Last week Benjamin and I walked through a park for two hours with no agenda. That conversation became this article. I didn't plan to write this article. It just wanted to be created through me.
P. S. Everything in this article comes back to the same problem. We have forgotten who we actually are in the pursuit of performing for an algorithm. Before you can write in your own voice, you have to know what your voice actually is.
I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so your business becomes a vessel for your life’s work. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.
https://arxiv.org/html/2501.19361v1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294988212500091X
https://arxiv.org/html/2401.13481v3
I’m not anti-tech, I’m pro-art.
I write every day. Usually in the morning. And what I've noticed is that I spend less and less time staring at the blank screen and more time thinking about what happened recently and where that thought takes me. I enjoyed this article enough to read the whole thing and comment.
Dear Philip, hello.
You are 100% right. Your profile was the first I subscribed to, and your posts literally read my mind. For a while, I even suspected they were written by AI because of how clearly they articulated thoughts I've held for a long time. It felt impossible that a living person could capture that essence so precisely.
As a creator, I’ve started using AI for everything. Being a native Russian speaker and a poet, I feel so much but can often express so little in English. More painfully, living with bipolar disorder has affected my cognitive abilities over the years. AI has become my vital "structurer" — I dictate my chaotic, raw thoughts, and it gives them the form I can no longer maintain on my own. It’s an alliance that allows me to speak when I otherwise couldn't.
However, I’ve reached a difficult crossroads. When AI builds the structure, the result often feels "wooden," and my authorship feels lost. This is why I have so many unfinished projects and drafts that I’m afraid to publish; I fear they’ve become lifeless and automated. I am terrified that if we surrender our decision-making to the algorithm, we lose our subjectivity and our right to be named as authors.
I believe the challenge of our era is finding the "golden mean." We must seek a balance where we remain present and use AI as a tool for good, not as a replacement for our souls. As we approach the era of AGI, preserving our authentic authorial voice — even if it’s messy or lacks perfect grammar — becomes a vital act of survival.
I am learning to be an author in alliance with AI without losing myself in it. In a world where purely human-created content is becoming a rare treasure, transparency about how we use these tools is the only way to maintain true identification. Thank you for broadcasting the thoughts I was almost afraid to face.
P.S. I dictated this via microphone and used AI to translate and structure it. If I could just speak to you directly, it would be simpler, but I am grateful for this invention that allows me to witness and participate in this evolution.