tl;dr – We don’t fuck with it
Here at The Author Buddy, we want to be very clear on our stance on the use of AI.
While we believe publishing should be accessible for anyone with dreams of being an author, we also strongly believe that the work should not be created with the support of AI.
This is, in part, because AI is not yet sophisticated enough to create original content and is, instead, using regurgitated content it has scraped from other people. This essentially means that using generative AI for content creation is theft of other people’s creative work.
We strongly believe supporting the future of creative work also means protecting creatives.
Now, we do understand that there are industries and areas where AI could be a great help to humans. There are AI tools that can make the world more accessible for people with disabilities. There are huge opportunities in data analysis that could lead to scientific breakthroughs that otherwise would have taken decades. Responsible, ethical AI usage is possible when approached in a strategic, limited capacity with appropriate consideration given to balancing environmental impacts.
However, we believe that it has no place in the creative world. We as a company do not use it ourselves in any of our services, and we do not accept submissions of AI-generated or AI-assisted creative work.
AI is everywhere right now because a bunch of rich guys decided they wanted it to be. It can be difficult to avoid it. We know that stock photo libraries are full of it, and almost every app or software has integrated it in some way. We spend a good bit of time working diligently to avoid it in all of the tools we use as a company, and we are continuing to work toward better systems to do so. We never knowingly use AI, and as AI changes and expands, we will continue our work to avoid it.
And we ask that our authors do the same.
We are not anti-technology, and we do not believe that all use of technological assistance in the writing process is a violation of ethical creative conduct. Intent matters, and there is a huge difference between the intent of using a spellchecker in your writing software to help you identify typos in a work that you created, and the intent of entering a prompt into ChatGPT to write a story for you.
We say this not to judge the choices of any author, but to set a boundary that we as a company choose to stand by our values and not work with AI.
We reserve the right to cancel any project if we suspect an author knowingly used AI in the work they submitted to us for services. Cancelled projects forfeit the non-refundable deposit, and waive the obligation of The Author Buddy to provide full or partial deliverables for the service requested.
The Author Buddy is a business about people, about authors who pour their hearts into their work, and who deserve a supportive buddy in their publishing journey. We will always maintain these values, and as weird as it feels to need to say it, humans will always be our priority.
– The Author Buddy Team
