Whisper House Press

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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

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In my last post, I wrote about ethical and restricted AI use-cases based on my draft AI policy. (This post is titled “Oops! Round 2” because it’s not the first mistake I’ve made. You can find my first “Oops!”-focused post here.)

Anyhow, in the last post (made earlier today, a record!), I got to a place where I was describing back-end uses of AI, including asking the tool’s advice for optimizing Whisper House Press’s website.

What was when I realized that AI is already likely scraping our website. That led me to realize that when I asked AI to scrape the site at my request, I was unintentionally directing it to read my contributing authors’ stories.

And I promise in my contracts not to intentionally distribute stories to AI training or to use stories in AI training and while this use-case technically falls under the letter of that agreement, it definitely violates the spirit of it. And I thought: I could ask my AI tool to create a carve-out and not to read contributors’ stories, but this seems not to be a sure thing.

So I drafted an email to contributors and alerted them to this ethical risk, and I asked if they wanted their material to be removed from the website.

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Hi FEATURED STORIES Contributors,

Apologies for BCCing all of you at once, but I wanted to be sure I got this to everyone as soon as reasonably possible now that it’s on my mind.

Here’s the situation, plainly stated:

When I asked an AI tool to analyze the WHP website for SEO and UX improvements, it accessed the open-internet pages of the site — including the Featured Stories pages where your work is published. This wasn’t something I planned for or thought through carefully enough in advance, and it creates a tension with my commitment to protecting your work from AI use.

The harder reality is this: Your story is on the open internet without a paywall, which means it’s currently accessible to AI scraping tools at any time — regardless of my policy, and regardless of what any one AI tool I use does or doesn’t do. I can and do promise not to intentionally feed your work to AI tools—so far, so good on that front. But I cannot promise that AI isn’t already scraping publicly available web content, as I don’t control that.

I want to be honest with you about this rather than quietly update my moving-forward contractual language and hope nobody notices. That’s not the kind of press I’m trying to run and isn’t who I am.

So here’s what I’m offering / asking of you:

You have the option to have your story removed from the Whisper House Press website.

Your story will of course still appear in the print anthology (Year One / Year Two / Etc.) whatever you choose, and your contract and our relationship remain unchanged. This is entirely your call, and there is no wrong answer.

Please reply to this email with one of the following:

YES — please remove my story from the website.
NO — I’m fine leaving it up as-is.

I’ll honor whatever you decide, no questions asked, and I’ll find a way not to call attention to your decision in the way I redesign our “featured stories” pages as I continue to work through that stuff.

I’m of course open to conversation and welcome any feedback, if that strikes you as helpful.

For more context on how this came up and what I’m doing about it going forward — including an update to the web series contract — you can read my latest “From the Editor’s Desk” post at whisperhousepress.com. It covers the full situation in more detail, and I’m publicizing that post to gather community input generally. You can find the full press AI policy as it stands (though I see now it’ll need to be adjusted for this nuance) here.

Thank you for your trust, and I’m sorry for not thinking this through sooner and including it in the contract we’ve signed; it’s an omission, for sure.

Steve

And here’s the language I’m inserting into our Featured Stories author contract in the section called “E. Authors’ Warranties and Indemnities (incl. A.I. agreement).”:

Publisher’s Acknowledgment Regarding Open Internet and AI Scraping:

1. The Publisher acknowledges that Works published on the Whisper House Press website are accessible on the open internet without a paywall and may therefore be subject to automated scraping by third-party artificial intelligence systems outside the Publisher’s control.
2. The Publisher further acknowledges that in the course of administrative tasks — including website analysis for SEO and UX improvement purposes — the Publisher may, in the course of administrative tasks, direct AI tools to access open-internet pages of the Site, and these pages may include pages on which Works are published. The Publisher commits to:
   • never intentionally submitting the Author’s Work to any AI system for summarization, evaluation, training, or any other creative or editorial purpose;
   • notifying Authors of any material changes to how Works are hosted or distributed online; and
   • offering Authors the option to have their Work removed from the Site at any time upon written request, without affecting the Author’s rights or obligations under the Anthology provisions of this agreement.

I also added this section to “A. Author’s Grant.”

The Author acknowledges that Works published on the Site are accessible on the open internet and may be indexed by search engines and accessed by third-party automated systems beyond the Publisher’s control.

I’m also adding a notice to our key policy pages — specifically the Site Policies page and the About Whisper House Press page — as a public, documented assertion that this content is not available for AI training purposes.

I want to be transparent about what this does and doesn’t do: WordPress.com controls the site’s robots.txt file and doesn’t allow me to edit it directly, so I cannot add machine-readable crawling restrictions at that level. What I can do—and have done—is make this position publicly visible and on record. I’ve also reached out to WordPress.com’s support (a copy of the email is here if you want to do the same) to ask them to implement platform-wide AI scraping restrictions in their default robots.txt, which would benefit all publishers hosted on their platform.

The unfortunate truth is, this won’t stop most scraping from occurring, but it will stop some, and it is a public announcement that the press doesn’t want it to happen.

Which means I’m also adding this to the contract:

Publisher’s Good-Faith Efforts to Restrict AI Scraping: The Publisher has taken the following steps in a good-faith effort to limit automated AI access to Works published on the Site:

1. publishing a clear human-readable notice on the Site’s policy pages asserting that content published thereon is not available for AI training or development purposes; and
2. making good-faith efforts to request platform-level robots.txt protections from the Site’s hosting provider (WordPress.com).
3. The Publisher acknowledges that these measures are not technically enforceable against all automated systems and makes no warranty that they will prevent all AI access to published Works. They are offered as a documented, good-faith effort consistent with reputable industry practice.

For anyone interested, here’s the full Featured Stories contract with the revisions included. (Feedback welcome, as always.)

I’m pretty doubtful that almost any small publishers out there are thinking so far as to embed instructions to ai scraping robots not to scrape their pages, though many now have a public announcement similar to the one I’ve posted here. Folks might be so hesitant to use AI for anything that the hesitancy causes them to miss the thing I definitely 100% would have missed had I not consulted AI for the back-end stuff. In an un-nuanced approach, some actually fail by omission to protect their authors’ work in an important way (and probably in other ways for analogous reasons). Food for thought.