AI Policy

[RapeU]

AI Policy

Our forum is a place for stories written by humans for humans, as they tend to spark the kind of meaningful dialog between authors and readers that we value. While AI can be a useful tool during the creative process, we want the author of a story to be the person posting it, not the software they used.

AI can be used for tasks such as research, translation, brainstorming, and proofreading. However, we do not want the forum to be flooded with low-effort AI-generated content ("AI slop").

The author of a story should be you, not the AI, and the use of AI should be communicated in a transparent manner.

Use of AI as a Tool

We have no objections to use of AI as a tool in writing, such as (but not limited to): translation, help with research, advice on location and characters, proofreading, suggesting small descriptive additions or alternative phrasing, polishing phrasing, or creating illustrations for a story.

AI Generated Stories

We define an AI Generated Story as one that meets any of the following criteria:

• The AI writes the majority of the narrative from a prompt (or series of prompts).
• Significant portions of the story's prose were generated or substantially rewritten by AI.
• The human contribution is primarily in the form of creative input or light edits.

When to Tag AI Use

If you use AI as a tool in your writing, but not in a way that meets the criteria for an AI Generated Story—great! No tag is needed.

If you use it to translate please disclose which AI/Translator you used in the form of an author’s note before or after the text of the story. No tag is needed in this instance.

If you post a story that meets the criteria of an AI Generated Story, we request that you:

• Add the AI Generated tag to your story.
• Disclose the level of AI involvement (if desired).

Note

• It is up to the author to decide if their story meets the criteria of an AI Generated Story, and we trust authors to make that disclosure in good faith.
• If the moderation team determines that a story appears to meet the criteria of an AI Generated Story, the story may be tagged accordingly.
• AI generated stories are not eligible to participate in contests.
• Use of the AI Generated tag will not count against the tag limit of 6 optional story tags.

Examples:

I will use examples from my own stories.

When to tag AI Generated

Door 666 would qualify as an AI Generated Story. While the plot behind the story was my own, I typed it up into chatGPT and asked it to create a draft with what I wanted. From there I used a significant portion of the draft to fill in the rest of the story. Therefore, I have added the AI Generated tag and withdrawn it from the "You" contest.

Door 96 was also similarly AI generated. A significant portion of the story came from me copy/pasting what I had written and I asked AI to fill in the gaps.

When the AI tag isn't needed

Door 69 was something I typed up in google docs relatively quickly and used standard spelling/grammar checks. Stories like that don't need an AI tag.

Back Home With this story I used AI as a tool instead of having it generate the story. I typed in the prompts for the community contest and asked it to generate ideas for an adult themed story. The ideas were bland, generic, and not very helpful. However, it did get my mind thinking about the plot that I ended up using for the contest. As I created the story, I worried about it being too exposition heavy and copy/pasted what I had written into AI and asked for feedback. From there I made minor edits based on the suggestions it gave me. Stories like that don't need an AI tag.

[SillyScary69]

That seems reasonable.

If I were writing the policy, I think II would go a little further, making the tag criteria a little looser (something like "if an LLM contributed any major passages of text") and asking for a text disclosure for any AI use even if it didn't meet the tag criteria, with a possible exception for translation. But I don't expect everyone to be as anti-AI as I am.

[VictimEyes]

@SillyScary69 , you are not alone. While certainly I hope that AI will fulfill it's promise and make the world (outside this website) a better place, it doesn't belong here at all.

I will paraphrase an old saying.

Give a man a fish, he eats for 1 day.
Teach a man how to catch fish, he eats every day.
If a man is hungry enough, he will figure out to catch fish on his own without any help from you.

Application of AI inhibits our ability to learn to catch fish on or own and does not belong on a forum that calls itself an academy. This policy, for me, is far too permissive. We should be learning on our own how to polish phrasing, do research, proofread, etc. We should be working toward being that institution that succeeds in creating original content when AI technology fails (and it will eventually).

Ladies and gentlemen, if we open the door to "AI slop", we will NOT be able close it afterward. DO NOT open that floodgate.

I, as a brand new, rookie writer with big dreams and much to learn cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I fear that AI will only inhibit my growth as a writer of fiction.

[Claire]

@SillyScary69 We were trying to come up with a consistent standard for what is considered an acceptable use of AI and what is not. And I think the line we are trying to draw here is similar to the distinction society has made for human authorship for decades if not centuries at this point.

If an author gets feedback from a (beta-)reader for example and then chooses to adjust something, we don't require the author to name that person at all, let alone as a co-author. We also don't see another human helping with proofreading, or the involvement of classic spellchecking software like word as something that needs to be divulged to the reader.

But when another human writes a significant portion of your story, we usually expect that person to be listed as a co-author then.

And that is roughly where the new rule tries to draw the line. Does the AI's influence reach a point where, if another human did the same thing for you, you'd expect them to be listed as the primary author or co-author of your story?

So the idea is not define a new standard for generative AI but to apply an existing one. At least to me, it would be weird to treat spellchecking done by libre office as different from spell checking done by chatgpt.

To give another example: When we discussed the rule internally, I pointed to @RapeU's story "The CUNT Rapist". After I read the first few chapters, I gave him feedback on the opening of his story and he ended up rewriting the opening to improve pacing and reduce exposition. My feedback triggered the change, but the writing was done completely by him. I would find it weird if I was now credited as a co-author on his story because of that feedback.

If that feedback had instead come from an AI, I would now apply that same standard and say that I see no need for that to be mentioned as long as the AI doesn't do the writing for him.

So long story short: The basic idea is to apply the already existing standards for co-authorship to AI and allow AI to be involved to the degree a human editor might be without that editor becoming a co-author. The line is therefore drawn at significant amount of text being generated for the story by AI.

That being said, I'm not saying people can't apply a stricter standard based on different criteria. Maybe someone would like to see any kind of AI involvement to be made transparent similar to how they'd like to know whether child labor was involved in the making of a product. If you think for example that generative AI is problematic because its use is ressource intensive, then I think that's a fair argument too. But we were mostly concerned with maintaining creative integrity and guaranteeing that genuine human works don't compete for example against quickly produced AI slop in contests.

[Labaal]

Yeah sure that was just a personal principle I apply to myself if anyone else feels comfortable using ai for writing or editing that's their artistic choice

[RapeU]

Using AI as a tool can be incredibly useful. It can help with brainstorming, research, feedback, and getting past writer's block when you're staring at a blank page with no idea what to write next.

The problem, at least in my experience, is that there is a difference between using AI as a tool and depending on AI to do the writing for you.

Door 69 was a success in the last flash fiction tournament because it was entirely my own work. When it came time to write a sequel, I struggled. I had the idea, but I couldn't figure out how to turn that idea into a story. Instead of working through the writer's block, I leaned heavily on AI to create Door 96. Looking back, that was a mistake. While the story had some interesting ideas, it lacked the same voice, personality, and creativity that made Door 69 work in the first place. Unsurprisingly, it did not perform nearly as well in the contest it was in.

A similar result would likely have happened with Door 666. The more I relied on AI to generate the actual prose, the less the story felt like something I had written. The ideas were mine, but the execution increasingly belonged to the software.

That experience is one of the reasons for this policy. I am not opposed to AI. I still use it as a tool, and I think it can be valuable when used responsibly. However, I have learned that the stories readers connect with most are the ones that come from a human author's voice, imagination, and experiences. AI can help spark ideas, but it cannot replace the creativity that makes a story feel personal and worth discussing.

In the end, I believe stories are better when written by people, not by algorithms. It's better to skip a contest because you can't come up with an idea than to have AI generate a story and present it as your own.

And yeah, in both cases for Door 96 and Door 666, I should have known better. I knew I was relying too heavily on AI, and the stories suffered because of it.

[LtBroccoli]

I like how we're approaching this policy. My stance on AI has shifted in the last year or so from "Kill it with fire" to "Google is fundamentally broken and the only way to search for anything is to ask Claude or ChatGPT while trying to navigate the dying internet."

Personally, I've been putting an AI disclaimer on any stories I've used it for any purpose. Most of those are research and detail refinement like setting or character names. For example, in "A Dish Best Served Cold", many of the settings like Redstone College and the streets around Collegetown were generated by ChatGPT after some back and forth over what I was trying to accomplish. But the dialog, the prose, and story beats are all mine. I know me well enough that if I don't outsource some of the things like name selections or street layouts, I will spend hours literally drawing a map of a suburban plan that will only be used once, maybe twice in a decade just so I can give directions in a throwaway line. Or I'll spend an hour trying to decide if Brayden or Jayden is a better choice for the victim's ex boyfriend who didn't answer her text. And that's time that's better spent writing.

I'm old enough to remember when Photoshop came into popular use. Illustrators and graphic designers looked down on anyone using Photoshop as a hack and not a real artist because they used a computer to make their art instead of spending days drawing each layer by hand. Now, everyone uses photo editing software to do everything from color adjustments to major changes in context. AI is like that. It's a tool and how we use it going forward will change our workflows in the future.

[Shocker]

I think it’s a good approach to that topic. Personally I have come down much more on the side of Kittyumbrass’ point of view, I avoid ai like the devil does holy water. The only ai use in my stories, is the advanced spell and grammar check of my word processing software.

I do understand that other people use ai in various cases, eg as a search engine, and yes I do read googles au summaries before proceeding to the source. Requiring the ai tag, allows readers to decide for themselves, what they want to read. I rarely ever check tags before reading a story, and I wouldn’t stop reading @RapeU or @LtBroccoli just because of such a tag. But I would think twice about a new author, whose stories carry that tag. I definitely have not touched some stories of authors who stated that they rely heavily on ai for writing of their stories.

Just my two cents.

[Blue]

Since I belong to a nearly extinct generation that used to work with printed encyclopedias, I still only use AI today when searching for historical background information.

When I set my mind to a topic, I write about it myself. I don't have AI look over it to proofread or offer suggestions for improvement. In that regard, I am—and remain—old-fashioned

[MillieDynamite]

I use AIs for editing or plotting purposes only. On Editing: I make the changes myself and never let AI dictate, add to, or detract from my words. When plotting, I write out my brainstorm and have AI use it to give me a basic three-act bullet-point outline. From that, I expand the outline and write from it. AI seems to handle the basics well; it doesn't outline my twists, if I have them, or my subplots, if I have those.