Q. What is the Strange Horizons policy on AI submissions?
A. It’s a gestalt.
Q. Is there a short answer? If I scroll to the bottom, will the short answer be at the bottom, like with online recipes?
A. No.
A long answer that starts with a poem
If you go to my personal Facebook page, you’ll see the banner image is a stereo card from 1876: the Statue of Liberty’s hand and torch, not yet assembled into the final statue, touring the US to raise funds for construction, exhibited at a centennial celebration in Philadelphia.
I have no connection to Philadelphia or to New York City. Or to France, the French sculptors of the statue. None of my ancestors, as far as I know, passed through Ellis Island.
What I connect to is a poem by Emma Lazarus, a probably lesbian anti-racist Progressive, a poem she published in 1883, before the statue was finished. I can republish it here because it’s old enough it’s in the public domain:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It’s a speculative poem. It’s about a statue that didn’t exist. It’s a dream for a future version of reality and a new kind of superhero. Mild-eyed. Using her might not in defense but in welcome.
It’s the core text of my life. I don’t know whether it describes the Statue of Liberty.
Gatekeepers and Magpies
There’s a common but mistaken idea that editors are gatekeepers: the doormen deciding who gets to belong to the club. In reality, we’re more like magpies looking for shiny things. We don’t take this job to keep people out. We take this job to try to squeeze more people in.
You can see it in Strange Horizons submission guidelines over the years. Over and over, in each special issue to celebrate a subset of writers, we’ve asked people to self-attest. We’ve operated on trust. We’ve explicitly welcomed disaspora voices and told authors to count themselves in if they worried they’re boundary cases. Not once have we asked for proof.
At the moment, a lot of writers are worried that they’re competing against AI-generated submissions. What if we mistake a simulation for a human, and prefer it, and cut off the pipeline of writer development? Simultaneously, a lot of writers are worried they’ll be accused of using AI tools when they know they didn’t. How do you prove you didn’t?
And what’s the line? If I used a prompt I didn’t invent, but I wrote the story, is that still my writing? What if I ran it through a grammar checker? What if autocomplete messed up what I was typing, and it made me laugh, and I decided to keep it? What if the point of my writing is that it’s a reaction to AI spam? Isn’t that part of science fiction?
If you’re wondering how Strange Horizons is dealing with this: pretty much the same as always, for better or for worse. We’re going to look for good writing, and trust that people are who they say they are and did the work they say they did. We’re going to trust ourselves as editors to choose writing we want to stand behind. We’re going to assume innocence and curiosity until or unless there’s a good reason not to.
Please recognize that trust for what it is. It’s an ecosystem. Don’t overwhelm it with slop you know is slop.
The opposite of top-down
We’re not built to be a defensive force. We are built to be springy and full of holes, like a safety net under a tightrope walker. We do not have a lawyer on retainer to fly across the world recovering fifty dollar payments from people who may have lied to us. None of us are government lobbyists able to go after robber companies or change copyright enforcement policies. We do not have a crack force of brilliant computer coders who can keep our website free to read from anywhere on any device while simultaneously blocking bots and scrapers, all without using automation.
We are figuratively but sometimes literally anarchists in a grubby basement making photocopied zines to leave on the train. One of our proudest distribution successes was when an accessibility editor printed off a poem and taped it to the door of a local grocer, simply because it was beautiful.
When you find rocks on the ground with little doodles and aphorisms, you have discovered the publishing process of Strange Horizons. Simultaneously, some of us might hate those rocks. Our process does not require consensus. The submissions guidelines of each department are different. And they change over time in response to what we read. We might say something is ok one month, and not the next month.
Will a chatbot get past me sometime, even though the poetry guidelines currently say please don’t send that? Maybe. From my perspective, it’s not different from the times someone’s plagiarized, or submitted a reprint as new work. If you warn me about an author or a piece, my response could be a lot of different things. I might disagree about whether something is “obviously” computer-generated. I might be persuaded but leave it up with a note. I might take it down. I might suggest revisions and disclosures. I might blacklist the author.
These are all responses I’ve had to other breaches of trust, or other accusations. There will likely be inconsistent responses between and sometimes within departments. It’s a case-by-case judgement call. It’s all a case-by-case judgement call.
You can make your own judgement call and decide you don’t like that piece. You’re allowed.
Frontier Justice
In the revisionist Western Silverado, when we first meet Kevin Kline’s character, he’s alone in the middle of the desert in his long-johns, badly suburnt and nearly dead of thirst. When asked how he got into that situation, he explains:
“I always figure you might as well approach life like everybody’s your friend or nobody is; don’t make much difference.”
It might seem like that character’s trust of someone unworthy made a lot of difference. But his default friendliness also means his character gets rescued, and teams up with the heroes, and defeats the same villains he would have faced off against either way. Crucially, he goes into the fight with enough context to know who is who.
There’s no way to eliminate risk when you’re meeting someone for the first time. And I love meeting writers for the first time. If our guidelines ask someone not to submit auto-generated text, I’m going to trust that they haven’t, even if they don’t have a publishing history. Even if the text does something I’ve seen a chatbot do, like lists or em dashes. If that means some cheaters get past me, I’ll live with it. I’d rather do that than block people who should have been let in.
If you reply to rejections rudely with the excuse that it was to “test” whether I was a real human, I do block you afterward. Because I know you did it. The first time I remember being accused of being a bot was in 2017, almost ten years ago, when it was in no way plausible. It’s continued since then. Before 2017, nobody was paranoid that I was a computer. They were instead paranoid that I was the false identity of various people.
In non-conclusion
I’m not interested in reading slush with suspicion. I don’t want to do deep background research on everything an author’s ever said on the internet. I’m not a CIA agent on guard against a perimeter breach. I’m not vetting a political candidate.
It’s not hard to get by me, not exactly. I’m rooting for you to do it. It’s not impressive. It doesn’t pay very much. The payoff, or the heist, when all is said and done, is a small piece of art and craft, offered to the world free of charge. Hopefully it expresses something emotionally true. Maybe it’s by someone who wrote other things that were awful; I don’t know. I was looking at this one thing.
For some of our readers, I understand that you might want the assurance that everyone who appears in our pages is a good person. I could, myself, appreciate an editor who could guarantee that. But I’m not that guy. My torch isn’t for investigative journalism, shining light into the dark places. It’s not for warding off the wolves. Those are good torches. My torch is a different kind of torch. It’s a beacon that glows world-wide welcome.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.