Good afternoon, fellow anime fans.
Sadly, I come bearing some somber news today. On Thursday afternoon, we received word that a writer who had previously contributed a pair of articles to Anime Herald was accused of using generative AI in their work. At the time, I was on a train toward Boston, so we were unable to act immediately. As soon as I reached our hotel room, though, our editorial team kicked off an immediate investigation that looked into several factors, including the author’s work with us, and their external body of work.
At the end of the investigation, we concluded that it was best to pull the writer’s articles, and to remove them from consideration for working with us going forward, in line with our Contributor Guidelines.
This is the first time that we have had to enforce this clause in our publication’s history. I hope it will be the last.
As to how this happened: in our first experience with this writer, their article was, to the best of our knowledge, completely written by a human, as were their supplied writing samples. The pitch for the second article showed the same personality and style that we had seen in the first article, so it made it through our first pass, and was ultimately adopted by the editorial team.
Ultimately, this incident proved to be a breach of trust with our team and our publication, which will inform our actions going forward. At the same time, I understand that this is also a breach of trust with all of you.
As a publication that is vehemently against generative AI, we have tried our best to ensure that all articles we publish are written and edited by actual humans, not machines that pollute the earth and shamelessly infringe on authors’ copyrights. Your trust in us is something I treasure, which is why I wanted to be forthcoming with you as soon as I was able to do so.
But, more than that, I would like to offer my sincere apologies. This is entirely my failure, as an editor, and I want to specify that it falls upon my shoulders alone.
To paraphrase a sign that was placed in Harry Truman’s Oval Office: the buck stops with me.
We will be adding additional safeguards in our approval and editorial processes going forward, to hopefully ensure this does not happen again.
I am sorry that this was allowed to occur on my watch. I hope that we can someday regain the trust that you had placed in us.
Regards,
Samantha Ferreira