Thoughts on A.I. & other updates
Submit to our Spring 2025 volume by April 30th
Dear Readers,
Just a reminder that we are open for Volume 9 Submissions until April 30th! Send us your art, nonfiction, poetry, and fiction! You can find the guidelines here.
Also, some exciting news! Our previous newsletter director
is publishing a novella with Broken Tribe Press, which will come out this Summer! The title is New Animal!Now, onto the main topic of this month’s newsletter!
A.I. & The Writing World
2 years ago, Clarkesworld Magazine raised alarm bells about A.I. stampeding on the literary world when they had to close submissions due to the overflow of A.I. generated stories they received.
A new self-publishing platform called Inkitt which uses A.I. to curate stories with popular Booktok-based genres (such as dark romance or romantasy) and sells them on the app Galatea, sometimes producing them into shows on their app GalateaTV. Many of these works are fully A.I. written. (Read this article from Esquire to see more of the issues with this program.)
The damage that A.I. is doing has only escalated, with writers discovering that their work has been used to train these machines without their consent, resulting in a class action lawsuit against OpenAI that has yet to be resolved. The Author’s Guild has taken an open stance against A.I. and is actively working to aid authors in this crisis.
Now, publishers such as Black Inc are requiring writers to sign a contract that grants permission for their work to be used in the training of A.I. models. At least in this circumstance, writers are being compensated.
The act of using A.I. to engage in the writing process for or with you betrays the concept of human creativity. Stories are what create human culture. We need artists, writers, and thinkers to do this. Not a machine ran by a tech billionaire with no morals.
At Paper Dragon, we have a strict NO A.I. policy. We will not accept any work that has been in any way created with the use of A.I.
I’ll finish off with a quote from Neil Clarke, the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine:
“We don’t have to “get used to” the negative consequences of [artificial intelligence.] Society didn’t roll over when spam started hitting our inboxes, when DDOS attacks came after networks, when viruses started infecting our computers . . . Humanity responded by developing countermeasures.”
Best,
Reagan Prior
Paper Dragon Newsletter Director Class of 2025