Our Values Re: Artificial Intelligence

A mini-manifesto on why we love you for being a human.

Dear Readers,

The idea for Copytext Magazine was first conceived years before generative AI existed—long before any of us could have known that for-profit LLMs would someday flood our feeds, substituting algorithmic averages for discovery and prompt engineering for craft.

But we’ve launched in a moment when Chat GPT and co. do exist. Operating as a process-focused magazine that publishes new work alongside an early and a middle draft has become a small act of rebellion in this strange new landscape of AI schlock. Copytext was born out of love for revision and the act of artistic creation, but as we espouse and embody our values as a magazine, we are proud to join the chorus of voices saying:

AI can’t write like you do, and we love you for that.

In an Era Overrun by AI

We believe the choice to participate in the often messy, deeply human process of creation is a radical act—a political and ethical statement. That choice is what we are interested in.

Our mission at Copytext is to honor, spotlight, and revel in the artistic process itself, showcasing art-making as an active and vital journey of discovery. With every piece we publish, we look for the intention, craft, and context that give birth to a creative work—to witness the story of how art comes into the world.

Touching Grass and Taking Swings

To generate “creative” writing with AI requires very little of oneself: no need to bring your sloppy, bleeding heart to the page, your wild spaghetti-at-the-wall swings and misses, your carefully honed skill. Generative AI lets you skip the sacrifice of time and intention.

To write well—that is, to create something that truly delights, startles, challenges, tears down old paradigms, and imagines new worlds—we need to live.

And what AI will never do is ugly cry in a bathroom at 3 AM, drum its fingers in boredom, eat delicious fettuccine, or, sure, touch some soft summer grass.

All AI can do is aggregate (steal) a million other people’s experiences to spit out a median approximation. And we don’t care about the rounded average of stolen experiences. We want to read about yours.

If We Can Get A Little Poetic…

We like to think of language as the metacognitive organ of the universe—humanity as the world listening to itself sing. (What, we’re a creative arts mag and you thought we weren’t going to have soft, squishy feelings about language?)

So what does it mean for us and our society if we opt out of that process? If we abandon the hard work of wrestling lived experience into shared meaning and delegate the work of language to a regurgitative AI? Nothing good.

We, at least, don’t want to live in a world overrun by copies of copies of copies, of “good enough” shlock that offers nothing new and alive. Copytext revels in the active, joyful, frustrating, messy AF process behind any great piece of art. We exist to study, analyze, and celebrate that process.

What We’re All About, Baby

We are absolutely committed to the idea that curating writing means offering a human reaction to works of art.

It should go without saying, but our Editorial Team will never use AI to evaluate your writing or as a tool for feedback. We firmly stand against society’s pressure to devalue the creator in pursuit of profit.

And we believe that justice, like a poem or a sketch, is an incomplete project in our world—one that requires active and ongoing attention, compassion, and re-visioning. As a platform, we exist to promote work that elevates the many collective and individual forms of resistance and community-building in this moment in time.

Copytext Magazine is our small way of centering the human: a curated corner of the internet for readers who enjoy messy drafts, appreciate craft in context, want more questions than answers, see writing as a form of thinking, love revision, hate revision, overuse em-dashes all on their own, and experiment for the sake of it—where you can witness and revel in the act of putting ourselves on the page.

This is an edited republication of the original essay we published on Instagram here.