A Note about AI-Generated Text
TDS is a space for human authors—and human authors only
Readers come to TDS for clear, helpful, and engaging articles on cutting-edge topics. We, in turn, are able to provide our audience with the information and inspiration they look for thanks to our authors: a cohort of smart, generous experts in data science, machine learning, and neighboring fields.
The qualities that make our community strong are distinctly human: curiosity, open-mindedness, the courage to share an informed opinion, and a desire to teach and to learn. This is why we’re committed to publishing work by human authors only, and why we don’t—and won’t—accept posts written in whole or in part by AI tools. We have updated our guidelines to make this point explicit.
Recent projects like ChatGPT have sparked lively conversations around originality and creativity, and raised a wide range of technical and ethical questions. As a publication, we’re fortunate enough to host the writing of AI researchers and industry leaders, and love sharing thoughtful articles on this topic (and have already). We also recognize that discussions of specific products and technologies often include examples of their outputs. As our guidelines state, we don’t have any issue with that as long as our readers know when it is the human author who’s speaking, and when it is a model’s generated text:
“If your article discusses these tools and you wish to include examples of text you generated, please keep them to a minimum, cite their source and the prompt you used, and make it very clear (for example, by using block quotes) where the AI-generated portions begin and end.”
It’s quite possible that we’re experiencing a moment of major transition in the ways humans and AIs interact and collaborate; we hope to continue to offer our readers sharp, insightful articles on this emerging and rapidly evolving development. We’re committed to covering this topic while still insisting on—and celebrating—the irreplaceable texture and voice of human writing.
If you have any questions, please leave us a comment.
