Hey DEV Community!
As a member of the DEV staff, I read a lottttt of your articles. Over the past month or so, it’s been awesome to see so many folks take up an interest in topics such as AI, OpenAI/ChatGPT, and the ethics of AI, art, and innovation. We want to encourage you to keep experimenting, exploring, learning, and having fun with this tech if it appeals to you.
And, as the Social Media Manager for Forem, I have to humble myself and admit that my team read some AI-assisted content that seemed human enough for us to share on social (not quite a Turing test failure on my part, but it kind of felt like one!).
So here’s the deal. We’ve had a few good conversations about AI-assisted and -generated articles on the Community team over the past few weeks, and we’ve decided on some guidelines we’re planning to implement to keep our community members safe and keep content quality on the site as high as it can be.
While there is nuance as far as what it means for a post to be assisted by AI, we care most that the author of the post is able to stand by the information they are sharing. We encourage the use of AI experimentation with the appropriate disclosure, while wholly discouraging the use of these tools to prolifically generate content which has not been scrutinized prior to publication.
The DEV Community Guidelines for AI-Assisted and -Generated Articles
AI-assisted and -generated articles are allowed on DEV Community, so long as they follow these guidelines:
AI-assisted and -generated articles should…
- Be created and published in good faith, meaning with honest, sincere, and harmless intentions.
- Disclose the fact that they were generated or assisted by AI in the post, either upfront using the tag #ABotWroteThis or at any point in the article’s copy (including right at the end). - For example, a conclusion that states “Surprise, this article was generated by ChatGPT!” or the disclaimer “This article was created with the help of AI” would be appropriate.
- Ideally add something to the conversation regarding AI and its capabilities. Tell us your story of using the tool to create content, and why!
- Be checked for factual accuracy before publishing. (This guideline was suggested by @chihuahuaux via Twitter. Thanks!)
AI-assisted and -generated articles should not…
- Promote any business, program, or course (including your own).
- Be published with the intent to confuse, deceive, or bamboozle its readers.
- Be published with the main purpose of building a personal brand, building a social media presence, or gaining clout.
- Contain educational content or information generated by AI because you, the human author, did not already know it to some degree. AI is great for assistance with English syntax for a variety of reasons, but if you don’t already know or understand the concept you’re writing about, please do not rely on the machine to “know” it for you.
Commenting Guidelines
- In order to support a strong sense of human community on the site, we ask that you not use bots or AI to generate comments on posts, whether the post was published by you or another community member. The exceptions to this rule are basic translation and grammar/syntax improvement tools, such as Google Translate, Grammarly, or any tool used for Assistive Technology (AT) purposes.
- If you notice a mistake or bad practice in a post that is disclosed to be AI-generated or -assisted, we encourage you to call it out (kindly, of course!).
The following actions may result in suspension or a ban:
- Publishing any article with the intent to harm or scam its readers.
- Publishing any article with the main purpose of soliciting money.
- Publishing any article with the main purpose of building backlinks to increase the search engine optimization (SEO) of another site. The two exceptions to this are: (1) a backlink to a personal blog, or (2) a backlink to a company blog IF the article has been shared under that company’s organization on DEV.
- Publishing any article that is directly plagiarized, knowingly or unknowingly.
Our guidelines may continue to evolve, and are open for scrutiny. At the end of the day, we expect good faith community activity, and that all authors are able to stand behind the purpose and accuracy of their content.
I’ll wrap this up with a big THANK YOU to our moderators and Community team for their hard work in promoting quality content and keeping our community members safe from script kiddies and bot trickery. We couldn’t do it without you! 💛
Latest comments (39)
Not necessarily. Our content moderation is performed by humans, and we take both the Code of Conduct and any additional context into account when making decisions about content.
Human writers on DEV are still expected to adhere to the Code of Conduct, and while we prefer that they refrain from the same types of posts we’re strictly prohibiting for AI-assisted and -generated articles, it's still allowed to promote your own brand or course so long as you do so without misleading readers and disclose any affiliate links
My usual workflow for writing anything is:
Nice article.
However we must agree the time is almost on us to agree that AI assisted text will become a normal thing in the near future.
However we must be careful or AI will continue to evolve and change the dynamics of how it can be spotted.
We only at the tip of what tomorrow will bring.
Eventually we won't be able to tell the difference between ChatGPT and legit posts. IMO it will really just come down to treating AI generated content as traditional content. If any post is low quality, plagiarized, or condoning illegal activities it should be reported then handled according to the rules of the site.
Pointing at posts and marking them as AI generated is not going help the situation. It will just cause readers to distrust genuine content and will cause writers to distrust moderators.
Look at Twitter and Reddit moderation and how they have evolved over the years. They have labels and rules for pretty much everything. It's at the point now where unless you have established some sort of prior credibility, it's nearly impossible to create a successful post. They pretty much prevent average users from going viral.
Tinfoil hat or not, our decisions of how we moderate AI generated content today is going to impact us for years. All we can hope for is that we get it right the first time.
I think a tag should be mandatory - not an either/or with a declaration in the body. That way readers can avoid or filter out trash articles upfront instead of having to plough through them to either realise they were probably AI written (usually pretty easy to spot) - or read right to the end (where most people would likely put a declaration).
Also, this would need to be enforced in some way... maybe run articles through a ChatGPT detector (there are some good ones around - some based on models provided by OpenAI) - and flag those that may need investigation.
The quality of content has sunk lower and lower in recent years, and the increasing number of ChatGPT articles here is merely accelerating that trend.
You'll definitely find this tool useful because it can help you come up with ideas, content, and even a variety of well-written sample articles
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chatgpt-for-search-engine/feeonheemodpkdckaljcjogdncpiiban/related?hl=en-GB&authuser=0
Nice!
Fast Move!
Very fair guidelines. I am very interested in AI-assisted writing as people are reading to get information. At the end, I don't think it really matters where it came from. As long as it is factual (I would like to see the AI incorporate citations), easy to read and well-structured, I'm cool with it.
Yes, there is the fear of AI writing putting content writers out of a job but the Internet apparently was going to close libraries etc...
The future is coming... (again and again).
Hey, thank you for actually linking to my articles!
First of all: I never intended to make anyone look like a fool or whatever by mentioning that the twitter API post got tweeted about.
Besides that, the article had the effect I intended it to have: Spread awareness on the topic of AI articles. I'm glad that the community guidelines got adjusted to restrict the use of ChatGPT, but not completely prohibit it.
While I think that it is a great tool, especially for people who's first language isn't English (including me), the quality of posts can be severely impacted (in creativity of topic and depth of arguments/explanations). I might do a follow-up article on this topic (taking your article into consideration), where I go more in depth about my point of view.
Of course! Thanks for being a good sport and for disclosing the nature of your AI articles. It's much more fun and engaging that way!
Just to be clear, these guidelines weren't written in reaction to your experiment—we had been discussing sharing some guidelines around AI content since ChatGPT exploded in popularity, and we've received a handful of reports on suspected AI content in that time as well.
Looking forward to reading what more you have to share.