AI Policy
The ethics and legal implications around use of generative AI are complex and still evolving, and there are a range of issues which are part of ongoing discussions and scrutiny, both specifically within the publishing industry and on a wider scale.
Our commitment to you
- Our courses have been created by a team of educators, editors and publishing experts, not AI.
- Our learning platform is secure from automated ‘scraping’.
- We will not use any work you upload as part of your course to train AI models.
Data privacy and security
- Student data collected through our learning platform is not publicly accessible and will not be shared with AI companies or used to train AI models.
- Student work and personal data are strictly confidential and will not be copied or shared without explicit permission.
- All discussions and content within our courses are private and confidential.
- Students are not permitted to enter any part of their course into AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DALL-E.
- Students are expressly forbidden from using generative AI to write peer feedback as this infringes on copyright, intellectual property, confidentiality and privacy of other writers on the course. Learning how to give effective peer feedback following our critiquing guidelines is an essential part of the learning process, as outlined in the course guidelines.
- Students are required to accept our T&Cs (which include clauses about use of AI) on our learning platform before gaining access to their course.
Guidelines for Using AI on our courses
- Students may use generative AI as research to support their own work, but we advise against entering chunks of your own creative work into chatbots due to the risk of ‘data scraping’ (or copying and using) huge amounts of information on the internet to train new AI models.
Additional resources
You may find the resources from the Society of Authors (UK) and Authors’ Guild (US) useful. They explore the issue of AI for writers in more detail and offer further information, and in-depth discussion of the issues, and links to more information and support.
The SoA’s position on Artificial Intelligence
If you have any questions, please email [email protected]
