No AI-generated content! That’s become the standard policy of most magazines in the world of literature, whether the magazines publish fiction, poetry, nonfiction, or any combination of these. Arts and literature publications want humans to send them original work without recruiting the service of function of any AI system.
It’s common sense to keep it human in art and literature by excluding AI-generated content – whether prose or verse or visual art. The point is rewarding human creativity instead of letting AI take over. It may seem as an anti-tech bias in a world that is increasingly relying on faster processing of information using AI programs.
But human ability in the realm of aesthetics is not speed. When email submissions and digital zines arrived in the world of publishing, few if any called it unfair to use these electronic means for publishing work faster or in a different format. The concern arises where humans are suspected of cheating – of letting do someone else the work that they are supposed to do, work that goes under their name.
In a way, the use of AI to create literature and artwork is akin to the ghostwriting practice: you hire someone else’s talent to do it and present it as your own. And by that account, magazines do need to ban ghostwritten work—which most publications don’t put in straight terms but by the Terms and Conditions that authors agree to send their own, original work. So banning AI-generated content is not an indictment of AI’s ability to generate work that heretofore humans have been known to be able to generate. It’s an indictment of human character. Publishers want people to present only their personal, unaided talent.
The question of copyright or plagiarism is secondary. Humans can just as easily copy or rip off someone else’s work, if not more, as any AI system. And at the end of the day, it’s a person submitting the work. AI systems don’t write to magazines on their own; not to date at least but who knows whether in the future they start doing it.
The good news for all the authors who rely on and take pride in their own talent is that editors seem to be able able to tell whether a work is AI-generated or genuinely created by a human mind. It’s keeping an edge over AI and be the mastermind in the field.
