To our readers,
With the rise of powerful AI text and image generation tools such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT and DALL-E, many media organizations are grappling with how these tools should or should not be incorporated into their content.
In this light, we at Illumin believe that it’s important to present some basic rules on how we will – and won’t – use AI content generation tools. We’re taking heavy inspiration from similar rules put forth by Wired (link to their post below). [1] You may notice some similarities between their rules and our rules.
First, we will not publish any articles written by an AI text generation tool. Illumin is student-written, student-edited, and student published. This is a core part of our identity. Having AI write articles for us instead of students defeats the entire purpose of Illumin.
Likewise, we will not use any AI generated images or graphics. There are still many outstanding legal and ethical issues surrounding image generation tools, including the fact that many of these tools are trained on other artists’ and photographers’ images.
The only exception to the above two rules is if we’re presenting AI generated text or images in the context of an article on that very subject. (For instance, it would be appropriate to showcase example text from Chat-GPT in an article about Chat-GPT.) Any AI generated content in this context will clearly be labeled as being generated by an AI tool.
That being said, we may use AI content generators for designing our website, for user analysis, and for marketing. This could include using AI to make our website easier to use, analyze user engagement on our website, and generate catchy social media posts to advertise our articles. In cases where AI is playing a significant role (such as if AI writes an entire social media post for us), we will mention that such content was created by an AI tool.
Finally, we reserve the right to modify any or all of the above rules in the future.
If you have any questions or comments on the above rules, feel free to reach out to us at illumin@usc.com.
Thank you so much for reading Illumin!
Sincerely,
The Illumin Editorial Staff
