[gynvael]

I thought about it (quite a lot actually), but eventually came to conclusion that this would end up being misleading and widely misinterpreted.

For example, one could argue that running a modern grammar checker over an article and based on that doing comma fixes should already be marked with "AI was used to create this article". But reading a statement like that makes folks think "AI slop", which would not be the case at all and would be insanely unfair towards the author. Even creating a scale of "no AI was used at all" → "a bit was used" → "..." wouldn't solve the misinterpretation issue, because regardless of how well we would define the scale, I have zero hope that more than a handful of people would ever read our definitions (and understand them the way we intended) posted somewhere on our website (or even in the zine itself).

Another example would be someone doing research for their article and using AI as a search engine (to get leads on what more to read on the topic). On one hand this is AI usage, on another it's pretty similar to just using a classical search engine. Yet still someone could argue that the article should be marked as "being AI enhanced".

There are also more popular use-cases for AIs, like just doing wordsmithing/polishing the language. A great majority of authors (including me) are not native English speakers, yet folks do want their articles to present well (some readers are pretty unforgiving when it comes to typos and grammar errors). LLMs are (if used correctly) good tools to help with the language layer. So, should an article where the author has written everything themselves and then used AI to polish it be grouped in the same bag with fully AI generated slop? From my PoV the answer is a pretty clear "no".

Anyway, at the end of the day I decided any kind of markings on the article won't work in an intended way, and outright banning any and all AI usage won't work either (would be hard to detect / there is no sense in some cases / there are reasons to allow some AI usage). But - as you know, since you refer to our AI policy - I still decided we draw a line in a kind of similar place to where some universities draw it.

[LastTrain]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I do love the pub - both the approach and the content!