More specifically, don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published. (And even more specifically: by “AI”, I mean “generative AI”, aka Large Language Models – ChatGPT, Microsoft Clippy Co-Pilot, Claude, Gemini, etc. Obviously you’re not going to use a specialist AI that spots particular cancer cells to write, but it’s worth remembering that all those other kinds of AI exist.)
There are heaps of arguments about generative AI at the moment, but I don’t want to get into the weeds of all that. I just want to give you a heads up about this:
3 Lobed Magazine
Air and Nothingness Press
Arachne Press
Asimov Magazine
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Black Beacon Books
Clarkesworld
Cosmic Horror
Death by TBR Books
Horned Lark Press
Interzone
LBA Books Agency
Litro Magazine
Livina Press
Moss Puppy Magazine
Podcastle
Rogers Coleridge and White Agency
The Dark Magazine
The Fiction Desk
That’s not a cherry-picked selection. I check submission guidelines a lot – not just for my own work, but also for the Sending Writing Out list I keep updated for the Writers’ Greenhouse Community. Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing those notices everywhere. These are just the ones I happened to screengrab over a few days, as I updated my spreadsheets.
As you can see, no-one wants AI-generated writing. Not literary journals, not genre magazines, not agents, not publishers. Many don’t want you to use it for research and idea-generation either. Some even say not to use it for grammar checks. A couple years ago, I suggested using it for punctuation, which after all is a formal system, but we found that even with the strictest instructions not to change the words, it still did. And several places dish out lifetime bans for submitting writing that’s used AI.
To avoid using AI for research and ideas, I have a few tips.
Add “-ai” to your Google searches
That removes the AI summary at the top and gives you search results instead. I’ve found I get much better results when I remember “-ai”, and often they contradict the AI summary. Even when the AI summary gets it right, the pages written by actual human experts contain a ton more info that you might not have thought to research. Always, when we’re learning something, we don’t know everything we need to ask! The AI summary will only tell you what you know to ask.
Use the Writers’ Links trove of sites
I have a lovely curated list of very useful sites for writers, organised into Words words words • Characters • Places • Plot • World building • Historical research. It also contains lots of rangens, to help you come up with ideas. These are random generators using databases, not AI. Bookmark the Writers’ Links page!
In the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, every fourth weekly Writing Skill features a useful online resource, to help you explore these. I’m steadily adding all the sites I feature there to the Writers’ Links page as well.
Block ChatGPT & co on your server
Did you know you can block websites on your own server? If it’s your internet account, you can! If you struggle not to reach for it, that’s a lovely hard-core solution! And if you’ve been paying for ChatGPT, and you’re going to stop using it, what about slinging that money Wikipedia’s way, instead?
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I have many, many more opinions about this – of course I do, everyone does right now – but this isn’t about My Many Opinions, it’s just a PSA: don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published.
