I hate that I have to write this, but I’m watching everything I’ve built over the past three years get buried alive by an avalanche of garbage and I refuse to go down without saying something about it.
The Wise Wolf has been on Substack for three years. Three years of sixty-hour weeks before we earned a single penny. Three years of research and writing and editing and building an audience one reader at a time. Three years of covering stories that the mainstream media refuses to touch because their corporate sponsors won’t allow it. We were once ranked in the top 100 publications in both faith and finance on this platform, and we earned that ranking the old fashioned way by actually doing the work.
In the last three months, our rankings have tanked. Our readership has dropped by 400%. We have 58,000 subscribers and somehow our last article only got 3,000 views. And I know exactly why this is happening.
The AI Slop Invasion
Substack has been invaded by an army of people who have never written a single original sentence in their lives. They sit in countries thousands of miles away from America, fire up ChatGPT, type in a prompt about whatever American news story is trending that day, and publish the resulting garbage as if they actually wrote something. They do this twenty times a day while real journalists like me and Lily spend twelve hours on a single article between writing and editing and research. We cannot compete with that volume and we shouldn’t have to.
One of the most disgusting examples of AI-generated slop to emerge are the ‘Jesus the Influencer’ videos that are so realistic that people ask in the comments ‘Is this really Jesus?’ Seriously, how can anyone be so intellectually destitute that they would believe, even for a single second, that there were camera phones in First-Century Judea?
These are not journalists. These are not writers. These are scammers who found a way to game the algorithm and extract money from people who don’t know any better. They flood the platform with AI-generated slop and use bot networks and dollar-an-hour workers to boost their engagement numbers until Substack’s algorithm decides they must be legitimate and starts recommending them to everyone.
Meanwhile, publications like The Wise Wolf that actually put in the work get pushed further and further down the rankings because we can’t produce twenty articles a day. We’re too busy actually researching and writing and fact-checking and editing, you know, the things journalists are supposed to do.
The Scammers I’ve Met Personally
Last week I decided to do a little experiment. I reached out to one of these AI slop jockeys pretending to be just like them, pretending to be a fellow scammer looking for tips. I wanted to see what they would actually admit to when they thought they were talking to one of their own.
This person flat out admitted to being an intravenous meth user who spends the money they earn on Substack on drugs and prostitutes. This is someone who writes about “Christian” topics. This is someone whose garbage shows up in recommendation feeds while real Christian journalists who actually believe what they write get buried. They’re laughing at you. They’re laughing at all of us. This is a joke to them, a hustle, a scam to fund their drug addiction while pretending to care about faith and values.
Lily had her own encounter. Someone reached out claiming to be a mother trapped in Gaza with a sick child who needed surgery, begging for help to escape to a friendly nation. Lily said she would send them ten thousand dollars but needed an email address for the banking transaction to work. The person happily supplied the email, and Lily used it to trace their actual identity. Turns out “she” is a 45-year-old man named Mohammed who lives in Lahore, Pakistan. Not Gaza. Not a mother. Not someone with a sick child. Just another scammer playing on people’s emotions to steal their money.
I see both of these people posting on Substack constantly. One of them is even a top-ranked “writer” on the platform despite never having written a damn thing in their life. This is just a game to them. This is how they pay for their vices while stealing from the mouths of people who actually are real journalists with real educations (and real student loan debt) who put in real work writing about real topics you will never hear covered on the fake mainstream news.
The Celebrity Invasion
As if the AI slop army wasn’t bad enough, now we have to compete with celebrities too. In the last month, a wave of famous people with millions of dollars and massive PR agencies have descended on Substack, going from zero to a hundred thousand paid subscribers in a matter of days. They accomplished more in a few hours than we’ve been able to do in years of actual writing.
They hire AI slop companies and professional ghostwriters to produce content under their name while they collect the checks and do press interviews about their exciting new “writing career.”
These celebrities saw a way to make some extra money off their name recognition and they don’t care if they’re stealing from the mouths of people like me and Lily who actually do this for a living. And Substack doesn’t care either, because as long as the money keeps flowing, they’re happy to shove big names down your throat regardless of whether those big names are producing anything of value.
Big names sell to small-minded people. Real news from real journalists just gets lost in the sea of mediocrity.
Why Independent Journalism Matters
Let me tell you why you should care about this beyond just feeling bad for me and Lily.
The mainstream media is owned by corporations that have agendas. They are told what they can and cannot write about. They are told which stories to cover and which ones to bury. They are not allowed to speak freely because their paychecks depend on keeping their sponsors happy.
Independent journalism exists to fill that gap. Real citizens living in America writing about real American problems without corporate sponsorships and without anyone telling them what they can and cannot say. Real writing by real people who actually write and research themselves instead of typing a prompt into ChatGPT and calling themselves journalists.
When independent journalism dies, the only information you get is the information that powerful people want you to have. When real journalists can’t afford to keep the lights on because AI slop shops have flooded the market with garbage, the powerful win. When scammers from foreign countries can pretend to be American commentators and drown out actual American voices, democracy loses.
This is not just about me and Lily. This is about whether real journalism can survive in an age where anyone with an internet connection can generate a thousand words of convincing-looking nonsense in thirty seconds and pass it off as legitimate commentary.
What I Gave Up To Do This
I walked away from a $150,000 a year job to do this. I left the corporate cage, the soul-crushing web development and financial analyst gigs, because I believed that independent journalism matters more than money. I believed that someone needed to be writing about the things that mainstream media refuses to cover. I believed that America needed more people willing to tell the truth regardless of who it offends.
And I still believe that. But I also have bills to pay. I have Lily to pay. She has one year left before she graduates, and I’ve been helping put her through school so she doesn’t have to beg her father for money or sign her future away to predatory student lenders. I would love to offer her a full-time job at The Wise Wolf when she graduates, but in order to do that, I need to still have a publication that can afford to employ her.
If the AI slop artists and the celebrity ghostwriters and the foreign scammers keep stealing our readers and potential readers, I don’t know if The Wise Wolf will survive another year. And if it doesn’t, I have to go back to being a financial analyst. I have to go back to the corporate world I escaped. I have to stop doing the work I believe in and go back to making money for people I don’t respect.
I don’t want that. Lily doesn’t want that. And based on the messages we get from readers every day, you don’t want that either.
How You Can Help
Stop paying to read garbage generated by artificial intelligence. Before you subscribe to anyone on this platform, look at their writing. Does it sound human? Does it have a real voice? Does it say things that a machine would never say? Or does it read like the same bland, inoffensive, algorithmically-optimized slop that every other AI-generated article reads like?
Stop supporting foreign scammers pretending to need help. If someone is claiming to be in a war zone and needs money to escape, do five minutes of research before you send them anything. These people are professionals at manipulating your emotions and they are laughing at you when you fall for it.
Support American journalists who actually bleed for their craft. Support people who put in the hours and do the research and write things that make you think. Support publications that tell you things the mainstream media won’t, not because they’re making things up, but because they’re not beholden to corporate sponsors who control what can and cannot be said.
Restack this article. Share it on your social media. Tag your friends and family. Let people know that there’s a difference between real journalism and AI slop, and that the difference matters.
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Help keep the Wise Wolf howling. I don’t want to go back to the corporate world. I want to keep doing this work. I want to keep telling you the truth about what’s happening in this country while the mainstream media looks the other way. I want to give Lily a career in real journalism instead of watching her graduate into a world where the only “journalism” jobs available are content farms that pay you to type prompts into ChatGPT…
Support real journalism. Support American writers. Support people who actually give a damn.
Thank you for your time and God bless you all.
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