Whisper House Press

Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.

the editor

As I’ve recently begun announcing, we’re opening soon to submissions for our next anthology (details here). And that’s the first submission call where I’m explicitly requiring submitters to self-verify that they’re not using AI to generate their stories.

So: I’m drafting an AI policy for Whisper House Press and would welcome your thoughts.

First, here’s my draft of a Human-Centric AI Statement:

At Whisper House Press, we are committed to celebrating and protecting human creativity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a tool for administrative efficiency, it has no place in the creative acts inherent in human storytelling.

Next, Our Promise to Authors:
We believe that money and respect should flow toward the writer. To protect your intellectual property, we make the following binding promises:

1. No AI Training: We will never use your work, or permit any third party to use it, to train or develop AI models, machine learning systems, or Large Language Models (LLMs).
2. No Unauthorized Transfers: We will not sell or transfer your work to any party that we reasonably expect intends to use it for AI development.
3. Human-Only Production: We do not use AI for any creative stage of producing our books. We hire human artists for our covers (attempting to ensure they’re not AI-dependent) and human authors for our stories.

Limited Administrative Use (transparency commitment, in practice): We are not a 100% AI-free company. We consult AI for non-creative tasks such as website coding advice, contract analysis, or marketing tips. We will *never* use AI to summarize or evaluate your submissions.

And third, Our Expectations for Authors:

To ensure every story we publish is a product of human imagination, all Whisper House Press authors must adhere to our “Human-Only” technical requirements. We do not rely on faulty AI-detection software (because it doesn’t work and can destroy people’s reputations with false AI-use flags).

Instead, we ask you to show your work, so to speak.

To be considered for publication with Whisper House Press, you must:

1. Verify Your Process: Produce your work entirely in longhand or within a single Google Document.
2. Provide Version History: If using Google Docs, you must provide a link with “Editor” access. This allows us to verify the timestamped version history, showing the story appearing naturally over time rather than being pasted in as a single block of text.
3. Sign an Anti-AI Warranty: Every contract includes a legal warranty affirming that the work has in no way been derived from or assisted by generative AI.

We aim to take the AI conversation off the table. We never want to have to ask someone to prove they didn’t use AI to generate/write a story for them, and this is one way to accomplish that goal.

What do you think of this AI policy?

(If your position is that AI has no place in the world, a conversation grounded by those parameters would be a very different conversation from the one I’m inviting you to join. If you absolutely hate AI in all applications, you won’t be helping me to get the nuances right in this tough issue. I respect your opinion but don’t need to read about it and can’t benefit from considering it here.)

THIS POLICY IS STILL IN DRAFT FORM. I’m sharing it in the interest of getting your feedback on the policy. The first publication for which it’ll apply is DOOM SCROLL, and I’m welcoming contributors’ opinions to try to get these nuances just right.

I posted some ethical questions about AI a few weeks back. Check that out if you’re into reading more on this topic.