Content Publishing Policy
AI-Generated Content Policy for ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications on Medium
We don’t accept content written by artificial intelligence tools, but we have a viable solution to make writers and readers happy.
Introduction
Illumination Integrated publications were established based on diversity, inclusion, synergy, and serendipity principles on 19 March 2020. Since then, our flagship publication, Illumination, has significantly impacted writers and readers on this platform. Our publications now serve 19K writers.
Managing the contributions of these writers with volunteer editors requires significant time and effort. Plus, Medium made publishing more difficult for us since 2021 by only allowing 30 editors per pub.
So reviewing and publishing hundreds of stories daily with a limited number of editors is challenging.
Medium leadership should consider this unnecessary stress their decision cause and give exceptions to large publications like Illumination, which contributes to improving the platform by filtering harmful content without compensation. We must take additional measures to enhance our productivity with this unnecessary limitation.
Our goal is to help our contributors become better writers and grow their audience with our support. As the editorial team, we embrace technology and even have a publication giving voice to technology storytellers. It is called Technology Hits. We also publish technology-related stories in our other publications.
We are not against technology, robotics, or artificial intelligence (AI). Our editors use and recommend publicly available tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway Editor for self-editing. These tools helped thousands of new writers gain more experience and become better writers.
However, some AI tools have recently been misused and even abused by content developers such as bloggers, freelance writers, podcasters, and videographers on writing platforms, websites, and social media. We explain these points in the following sections.
Our editors also observed this trend on Medium and our publications. Therefore, we decided to create a policy on this emerging issue after intensely discussing it in the last three months.
While AI is going through this exponential growth change, Illumination Integrated Publications need to set a policy that makes it clear to the authors what our publishing limitations are and what we offer those who invested in AI tools and want to use them to grow their audience responsibly.
AI-Generated Content Policy
Stories submitted to Illumination Integrated Publications listed below should follow this policy statement guideline:
Your story content must be human-generated and original, as validated by various tools our editors use and make an assessment. However, it is OK to use AI tools to do your research and edit your content with those tools as long as you are the author of the content. Stories not meeting this guideline will not be accepted in our publications except for our new publication, “Lampshade of Illumination,” designed to support AI-Generated content.
ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications include:
ILLUMINATION ILLUMINATION-Curated ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR ILLUMINATION Book Chapters Technology Hits SYNERGY Readers Hope Illumination Videos and Podcasts Illumination Gaming ILLUMINATION’s Blog Lampshade of Illumination EUPHORIA by Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Why did we create this policy?
We identified multiple reasons that motivated us to create this policy statement. We spent over three months discussing the issue after the ChatGPT tool was released to the public domain.
The most compelling reason is our readers don’t enjoy AI-generated content. They can easily detect them and mute writers of such content. So some readers called them awful and useless. We respect their choice.
Based on intense discussions with our 119 volunteer editors and selected 500 top writers, we understood that hosting AI-generated content would not add any value to our readers and the growth of our publications.
As advised by our content marketing strategists, the content generated by AI tools is easily recognized by search engine algorithms, and they are marked as spam.
These two reasons create undesirable situations for our writers. Therefore, we decided to show our leadership and guide them in their writing journey.
We care about the work and the future of our contributors. We don’t want them to be disadvantaged by ignorance and or misinformation on social media promoting AI-generated content in high volumes.
Recently our editors provided feedback to writers after they detected AI-written stories, especially using ChatGPT. Some new writers just copied and pasted the raw input from this new tool and submitted it to our publications.
For example, a new writer, who was not even a member of the platform, posted 15 ChatGPT-generated articles in an hour, which confused our editors.
Then he kept posting 40 more articles in the next few days without even checking the private messages we left. Another tech writer created a robot account and wanted to feed content via automated tools.
We did not publish those overtly machine-generated content and “TKed” before returning them to the writers. We only rejected the ones whose writer disabled private messages as there is no other way to communicate with writers on Medium.
By showing our care and tolerance, we gave feedback to those writers to re-write the AI-generated content in their own words and styles.
Some writers followed the feedback, made necessary changes, and resubmitted human-generated content, which we accepted.
On the other hand, some writers got defensive and removed their stories, or our editors rejected them after 48 hours as they did not want to pollute our publications with machine-generated and meaningless content, some of which is also inaccurate and misleading.
However, this process is highly cumbersome and wastes the scarce time of our editors, who are volunteers donating their time to help writers.
Therefore we had to develop a new policy to lower this unnecessary load, educate our writers, and delight our readers.
As of today, we will not accept stories fully generated by AI without wasting our time explaining the writers. However, as diverse, inclusive, and open-minded editors and publishers, we found a solution.
Introduction to the Lampshade of Illumination
With guidance from our chief editor and consulting editors, we created a new publication called “Lampshade of Illumination,” which will accept AI-generated content and some human-generated stories related to this type of content, such as pros and cons of using AI tools for writing, marketing, etc.
The Lampshade of Illumination was architected by the founder and chief editor Dr Mehmet Yildiz as inspired by his editorial team, who endorse inclusion, diversity, and unity rather than division and rejection on this platform.
We want to give every ethical writer find their voice and give a chance to grow their audience.
So whenever our editors identify AI-generated content, they will inform the writer to submit the story to this new publication, which might interest some readers.
We are optimistic and supportive of the choice of writers and readers of such content. We respect and don’t judge people’s preferences.
However, we don’t know how many writers and readers will be interested in this unique publication which seems to be the first of a kind on Medium.
More importantly, this new publication will be screened for harmful content as we do for all our publications. Editors will reject stories against Medium rules, such as hate speech, defamation, discrimination, misleading content, inaccurate facts, or conspiracy theories. We don’t accept porn and erotic writing from humans or AI tools.
We will commission the publication tomorrow on the 3rd birthday of Illumination and publish our initial guidelines, which will evolve as we learn more about these AI tools used for generating content.
In terms of story photos, we accept AI-generated images as long as they are correctly captioned with the statement,
“Image created by AI tool XYZ — the author has the provenance and copyright.”
You can check our image policy for details.
Publishing and Conduct Guidelines for the Lampshade of Illumination.
We provided practical tips to improve ethical and legal standards for AI-generated content on Medium.
Conclusions
We believe we made a fair and valuable policy to support our writers, readers, and editors and the sustainability of our publications.
Our advisors investigated the market and identified that reputable publishing organizations and news agencies heavily use AI for content generation and distribution.
We will publish an article about our research on this matter soon. So creating a publication allowing AI writing is no longer a controversial topic as the mainstream media already does.
Many thanks to our hardworking and caring editors who support our writers and readers with empathy and compassion. We are grateful for their contributions.
Medium also created an AI-generated writing guideline published by Scott Lamb. Here is the link to the story titled How we’re approaching AI-generated writing on Medium.
Please leave a comment about your thoughts and feedback to improve the first version of this policy and your thoughts about our new publication, The Lampshade of Illumination, which will be available soon.
Our Other Policies
Every writer contributing to our publications must review these guiding policies before submitting their stories. We are tolerant, but these are non-negotiable rules.
Here are our latest curated collections by ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION Amplifiers, and ILLUMINATION-Curators for your enjoyment.
You can learn about our editors’ backgrounds from this collection.
You may also check the bios of writers from their pens.
Curated Writer Bios
Learn about contributing writers of ILLUMINATION written by their pen
medium.com
Writing Challenges and Prompts
Helpful Resources for Writers and Readers
Starter Kit for Writers of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications
Improving the Quality of Writing Using an Editorial Checklist
Five Tips to Become a Prolific Writer Despite Full-Time Work
Invitation to New Writers
To join our vibrant publications, please send a request via this link.
We will help you gain visibility and succeed as a writer on Medium. Please mention the publication name with your Medium account ID in the request.
If you are new to Medium, you can join via this link. Readers can read thousands of stories, and writers can monetize self-published content.
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