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At the European Review of Books, we publish original writing by fresh voices from all over the continent and beyond. We write in English, but our editors and contributors often aren’t native English speakers. We love the traces of Greek, Ukrainian, Dutch, Chinese, Latvian, Italian, Maltese they can leave in their English writing. The ERB’s aim is not compatible with the extensive use of artificial intelligence as a tool for writing.
Contributors to the ERB should disclose to their editors if they use AI at any point in the writing process, and to what extent.
We can live with:
- AI support with spelling and grammar checks
- AI support with translation (as long as the published translation itself is written by a human)
- AI use for research purposes (as long as all sources have been humanly verified)
- AI use for transcription of interviews
- AI use for data analysis
Please consider the environmental cost of AI use, and know that for lots of tasks, there are many alternatives to AI agents that are much less of an environmental strain.
We cannot live with AI use for the writing itself, for structuring of texts, for the shaping of ideas or for any judgment calls. Our editors welcome wonderfully messy pitches and drafts filled with honest mistakes, written in the writer’s mother tongue, or in Frenglish, Dunglish, Spanglish, Benglish, Academglish, or whichever form of English feels natural to the writer. All of our published pieces go through an extensive (human!) editing process, and that kind of writing is a natural starting point for this process. AI-assisted writing that has been smoothed out and stripped of the writer’s personality, is not.