This week two students published an article in the Chimes, which said that they had written a poem using a large language model, submitted it, and received word that it was accepted. Their piece said that they did this to further conversation around artificial intelligence. This seems like it was going to happen inevitably, and aren’t shocked that somebody chose this semester to attempt to get this submitted. We agree that the conversation around artificial intelligence and the creation of art using large language models is interesting. The fact that an LLM wrote a piece good enough for our jury to accept it is interesting in and of itself. 

However, I am deeply disappointed that these students chose to allow this piece to be published. Once our open-to-all juries make their final decisions, we notify each submitter that their piece has been accepted. It was at this point that these students could have made their point while also retracting their piece from the publication, allowing an actual student’s creation to be featured in its place. Unfortunately, they opted to proceed with the piece’s publication. Although I wish this hadn’t happened, I am grateful for the chance to articulate Dialogue’s perspective on AI, and I hope this might serve as a guiding statement for Dialogue’s work going forward.

Dialogue is a human artifact. It represents the best work that dedicated students have submitted through the mastery of a craft, and by using that mastery to communicate insightful, beautiful, and sometimes painful things. This piece does damage to that community, and damages the integrity of that community’s work. A volume of Dialogue is made up of the best creative work of Calvin’s students in a semester, and the inclusion of this fundamentally deceptive piece hurts the students who have put love and time into their work, and my staff who have done the same with the journal.

To be clear, I see this volume of Dialogue no differently than the rest that I have worked on. In fact, I am more proud of this volume than any other. Inside are pieces by writers who I have watched develop over several semesters, pieces by visual artists trying exciting new mediums and techniques. My staff worked hard to put this together, and nobody harder than our two layout editors, Emily Griffin and Brynna Morren, who have made this volume simply gorgeous.

As Dialogue goes forward, this unfortunate experience changes little. Though it is unfortunate that our anonymous jurying process was taken advantage of, I absolutely believe that this is the best system to fairly select the pieces that are featured in each volume. If you’d like to see how this process works, I invite you to attend jurying next fall; it really is a blast. One change people might notice will be an addition to our submission form, asking submitters to confirm that the work they are submitting is 100% their own, and not generated by a machine learning model. This is the world we live in now, and Dialogue must change along with it. This does not change the fact that Dialogue is the work of humans for other humans.