Guidelines Updated to Add official AI Policy for the site.

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AI Use at Gay Authors: A Summary of Our Policy

Gay Authors is a community built around human creativity, storytelling, reading, and discussion. We also recognize that AI tools are now part of many modern creative and productivity workflows. Our goal is not to ban useful tools or shame responsible use. Our goal is to protect reader trust, author accountability, member privacy, and the integrity of the site.

Our AI policy is based on a simple distinction:

AI assistance is allowed. AI-generated creative content must be disclosed.

Authors and members may use AI tools for support tasks such as spelling, grammar, punctuation, editing suggestions, brainstorming, formatting, accessibility support, metadata suggestions, blurbs, summaries, coding assistance, and similar productivity uses. These ordinary assistive uses do not require public disclosure when the member remains the primary creative source of the work.

Disclosure is required when AI materially generates creative content that appears in a posted story, chapter, poem, image, translation, or other creative work. This includes AI-written scenes, dialogue, story passages, poems, major rewrites, cover art, illustrations, maps, banners, translations, or similar creative additions.

Until the Story App includes a dedicated AI disclosure field, authors who post AI-generated creative content should disclose that use in the Story Notes and, when appropriate, the relevant Chapter Notes. A disclosure can be simple and factual, such as:

• “This story contains AI-generated cover art.”
• “This chapter includes AI-generated translation assistance.”
• “This work contains AI-generated story passages that were reviewed and edited by the author.”

The person posting the work remains fully responsible for everything they post. AI use does not excuse plagiarism, copyright violations, inaccurate ratings, missing warnings, improper tagging, harassment, impersonation, spam, or violation of any Gay Authors rule.

The policy also prohibits deceptive or harmful AI use. Members may not use AI tools to impersonate another member, imitate another Gay Authors author’s distinctive style or story world without permission, generate fake comments or reviews, create spam, evade moderation, or scrape Gay Authors content for AI training, dataset creation, model fine-tuning, automated republication, or similar purposes.

We also want to avoid public accusations or AI-related arguments in story comments, reviews, forums, clubs, blogs, or private campaigns. If a member believes content violates the AI policy, they should use the Report feature and allow staff to review the concern.

Gay Authors will not investigate ordinary grammar tools, spellcheckers, brainstorming tools, or private writing workflows. Enforcement will focus on undisclosed AI-generated creative content, deception, impersonation, plagiarism, scraping, spam, fake engagement, and other violations of site rules.

In short: responsible AI assistance is allowed, human creativity remains central, AI-generated creative content must be disclosed, and members are expected to respect reader trust, author rights, and community integrity.

You can read the full site policy here (liked under Help as Guidelines)

https://gayauthors.org/guidelines/