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! 💛