Embracing the Human-Made Future
Explaining our policy on AI
Welcome back to The Author’s Corner, a weekly newsletter for the science fiction and fantasy author from ECLOGUE PRESS!
We’re humbled by all the support you gave us last week when we announced our new focus on a novel for our first publication. If you haven’t yet subscribed, do so now! We’ll be opening submissions for that novel very soon, and everyone who has subscribed to us will get the first chance to submit:
The Concert (Gerrit van Honthorst, 1623)
In last week’s edition of The Author’s Corner, you asked us in the comments for our policy on the use of AI. We reiterated our strict 100% no-AI policy, but for this week we want to give you a bit more elaboration on that pithy statement, as a preview for the rest of our submission guidelines. We hope this post can better inform your decision as an author whether to query with ECLOGUE PRESS, query with another publisher, or self-publish your work. If you disagree with our policy here, we still wish you and your story the best of luck!
We call our policy on AI a 100% human-made policy. There are three first principles that we derived it from:
The first principle is humanity. As hungry readers ourselves, we are constantly seeking human connection with the artist through their chosen medium, the page. We would rather believe that the person writing meant something special behind every word, even if many words have no special meaning behind them, than know for certain that the machine generating selected every word for its statistical frequency. The entirety of the written word as extant online may suffice for a training dataset, but it does not suffice to explain the qualities of even one single day in the life of any human being. Only the intellect which has already experienced it, not the pale imitator comprised of numeric weights, can find the proper words to evoke human experience.
The second principle is learning. At ECLOGUE PRESS, our mission is to help new authors and new stories reach the science fiction and fantasy audience. The debut author is still finding their voice. Even if they know all the technicalities of grammar, they are still learning pacing, tension, structure, and how to execute a satisfying pay-off. Indeed, no great author ever stopped learning throughout their writing career. But using AI is like riding a bike with training wheels; new authors will never reach their full potential so long as they rely on it to write for them. If we want to help them succeed, we need to encourage them to stand on their own skills, rather than stay hobbled by a mechanical crutch.
The third principle is partnership. We are a full-service publisher, not a hybrid publisher, but we still view our collaboration with any author as a partnership. We are seeking partners who have poured out all their love and energy into their work; cynically, it’s easier to sell a good story than a mediocre one. But in reality, we’re inspired to work with authors who love what they’ve written. We’re impassioned by them to bring their work to the marketplace and to the audience that should read it. We want to work in concert with not just the human author, but also with human editors who also have a genuine desire to see a story polished to its finest sheen, the human cover artists and designers who want to bring a story to life in a single glance, and the human reviewers who are compelled by its quality either to recommend or to probe deeper to the ideas behind the prose. All of that collaboration benefits everyone who participates, most especially the human reader.
These three principles broadly explain our 100% human-made policy. For the rest of this post, we also want to address some specific steps in both the creative and publication processes where we will never use AI, nor partner with those who do.
Research
AI-generated topic summaries are rarely more than surface-level analysis, and are prone to hallucinated facts and citations, as well as uncritically accepting whatever they’re trained on. Even if AI is able to improve its depth and accuracy, it would still not be a suitable replacement for you doing your own research. In order to write about it, you must know your subject backwards and forwards. Otherwise, the reader will quickly detect that there is no iceberg beneath the tip you’ve described.
Writing
While the first principles we hold, particularly learning, already explain why replacing handwritten (or typed) prose with AI-generated prose might be, at the very least, unhelpful to the author, there are also countless other arguments against using AI in your writing process that authors on Substack, like A.C. Cargill, have already made well. Here we want to address a specific use case that almost seemed acceptable to us, until we considered it more thoroughly. An author asked us:
I’ve gotten some great paragraphs and some sparky dialogue by speaking into Word and then using ChatGPT to clear up the recognition errors. I’m not changing my method. But I’m not going to lie about it either. Hence the question. My words are my words, my ideas are my ideas. Do you care how I put them on the page?
Admittedly, not everyone uses dictation to write, but we had to make sure our 100% human-made policy did cover every edge case. So we thought this one out too. We encourage you, if you think you use AI in an acceptable manner, to tell us about it in the comments below.
After much thinking on it, we had to conclude yes, we did care how the words ended up on the page, and that this method of dictation could not be accepted by us under our policy. While transcription is a classic use-case for machine learning algorithms, and indeed can be very helpful in other contexts, this method introduces an AI editor into what should be a human’s creative process. If it is trying to predict the next word spoken based on its training set and the input of your speech, that word may not be the word that was actually intended and spoken by you. And if you didn’t notice, or decided that that was a better phrasing, then you have already signed over your voice and what you meant by your words to the machine.
Editing
Along similar lines, we disagree with the use of AI as spellcheckers, proofreaders, line editors, or as more structural and developmental editors. In the case of catching typos, we’ve had rules-based spellcheckers and grammar checks in Word for decades now, and they always underline what fails their tests, even if it’s a false positive. The trouble with using generative AI for the same purpose is that they frequently miss misspelled words or bad constructions because they’re probabilistic, not rules-based. When using AI to reword your work, as above, you’re ceding your voice to what has been determined by numeric weights to be the most frequent phrasing seen elsewhere—AKA the most commonplace, consensus, tropey, bland way it could be phrased.
We understand that no sentence is perfect, and often first and second and even third drafts contain awkward constructions that could use some concision. But it still remains better to work with a human editor in that instance. You can have a real conversation with them about the difference between what you intended and what you stilted. They can be honest with you and tell you from an outside perspective beyond your own authorial navel-gazing when your prose is not working for the reader. An AI, on the other hand, has been told to be as pleasant to you as possible (to keep you engaged with it), rather than actually helpful to the quality of your work.
Not only will AI not be able to honest with you, it will oftentimes not be able to hold your entire novel in context and help you concretely with those large-scale structural and developmental edits. It lacks the critical eye that only years of experience spent editing can give and that can’t be learned from training on top ten listicles.
Cover Art and Design
Many authors are not visual artists and don’t have the skills when self-publishing to make a cover by themselves. But you don’t need to be an artist to tell when cover art was AI-generated. Your potential readers can spot the uncanny valley from miles away and they do judge your book by its cover. If the cover is AI-generated, they will likely think that the story was AI-generated too. And with the mountains of AI-generated slop being shoveled onto Kindle each day, now more than ever human authors need to differentiate themselves.
You can differentiate yourself by teaming up with a human cover artist and/or designer. With them you can have a real dialogue about what you would like on your cover, and they can suggest from their experience what has actually worked to communicate a story to its potential audience. Sometimes, self-publishing authors don’t have the resources to afford a cover artist or designer. But that’s what ECLOGUE PRESS is here for. We have the initial investment covered. We want to huddle with both the author and the artist and come out swinging with a cover that will distinguish their story, not diminish it.
Marketing and Promotion
If we won’t let our authors use AI in their work, we aren’t going to let ourselves off the hook either. We too want human connection with the audience we’re building for our next release. We too want to fortify our experience by figuring out what works and what doesn’t in selling fiction. We too want to partner with reviewers and booksellers and conventions and find success in collaboration, not artificial recombination.
While the copy we write as the publisher is more formulaic than the author’s prose we’re publishing, that doesn’t mean it is any less technical or any less worth time spent improving at it. Besides, if we want the cover to have a human touch, then the blurb on the back should have a human touch too.
Some may argue that not to use AI to promote a book is folly when many competitors are already doing it. To keep up with the rat race of discovering new readers, they might say we have to use AI to produce our marketing content; otherwise, we’ll never see enough sales and we’ll never be able to pay out the royalties our authors deserve for their work. We disagree. While discovery plays a critical role in filling the top of the customer funnel, it’s concrete engagement with the audience throughout the purchasing journey that actually turns prospects into converts. We think a personal connection with our audience is more important than spamming inboxes and feeds with AI-generated notes and posts.
Lastly, most people already hate ads, and they hate AI-generated ads even more. We don’t want that stain on our reputation, or worse, on the reputation of our authors.
If you too want to keep your work 100% human-made, and you want to partner with a publisher who understands and values that commitment too, consider subscribing to us! You’ll be the first to know when our submissions open: