AI has been a revolutionary tool for all those who communicate ideas. It has also revolutionised how people access information, and impacted some of the ways that people learn. Going into mainstream use in November 2022 with the rollout of OpenAI’s prompt-based generative text tool Chat GPT, an expanded landscape soon opened into view, incorporating generated speech, imagery, video and more. We all now live in that world, and for publishers it has been quite a challenge. First came confusion with questions such as: ‘why are we receiving so many more submissions?’, ‘surely people cannot use generative AI to write complex academic and technical papers with no human author engaged?’, ‘How can we detect this/how can we tell?’, ‘What kind of policy should we have on generative AI?’, ‘Should we also use generative AI in our editing’?, ‘If we can reliably detect it, should we reject all of it on sight?’, and so on. This article is not a systematic study of the issue at large. It is a focused account of how E-International Relations has answered such questions as those sketched above, with some personal reflections following. That being said, we do not exist in a vacuum and notes and experiences have been shared, distilled, and iterated upon by us as we developed our ‘answers’ or ‘approach’.

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The first thing we did was rewrite our submissions policy in early 2023 to include the words ‘your thoughts and your words must be your own’, and we continued with our prior editorial patterns based on a 2-step human review of all submissions (growing in number as they were). Our editors became sharper to the AI-like writing forms and ‘tells’ (you come to know it when you see it) and we got rid of those with automated rejections swiftly. However, as time passed, the way authors were using AI, and the tools themselves, evolved into a hybrid zone where you often could not easily tell, and in pieces that were clearly part-generated (in style by an author using AI-generative editing, or in substance) there were sometimes insights worthy of publication and we sometimes decided to roll ahead and publish those if we saw value, but we could not definitively prove AI was used beyond permitted assistive uses.

So, we treaded carefully, certainly not taking a zero-tolerance approach, and we kept thinking, learning, and reflecting. My role as the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher was central to this, as any new policy would need to be written, and overseen, by me (with the support of the team I lead). It is important also to note that every editor at E-International Relations, including myself, volunteers their time. And it was this issue that became one of two hinge points that got us to where we are today.

After a few years of this, I became sick of reading AI text. Other editors felt the same. It didn’t matter anymore if a human started a draft and then had AI-reshape it, or it was something more nefarious with little human involvement. The result was the same. It was boring, lifeless, formulaic. It was not this, but that. One of the joys of being an editor in the ‘before times’ was taking a piece of writing with genuine scholarly insight within it but presented a little poorly (perhaps the author wasn’t a good writer, or were writing in a second language), and digging into it and getting it into shape. That felt like a good use of my time. As an editor, you sharpen your skills, you learn more about the subject you are editing, you become a better writer yourself. It’s a net positive. The age of AI writing takes much of that away. And, as has become clear, it also takes a lot away from the person on the other side, the ‘author’ (though that word often needs to be in scare quotes these days). Now, people are turning off large developmental areas of intellect and skill – and a whole generation is not developing them much at all. That is terrifying.

A second hinge point in this journey came when we moved E-International Relations to Substack. We had been cross posting/mirroring here for a couple of years, but in late July 2026 we decided to fully migrate and make Substack the home for our publication. The change made me rethink the relationship I had as a publisher with our readers. Now, myself and my fellow editors were not just pressing publish and putting something on a website, but we were also sending something to thousands of email inboxes. It was more direct relationship, and it made me think about many things, AI being one of them. Around the same time as we migrated, Substack plugged Pangram (an AI detector) into its back-end publishing system so our editors can scan everything for AI. On top of that, publishers can enable readers to generate their own AI scans (in summary form) of published works when using Substack reader. We decided to enable this function for our readers (going for full transparency), and at the same time to rewrite our AI policy and draw a line in the sand.

So, two hinge points for those TLDR folks. 1. Fatigue with AI writing and 2. A temporal series of events tied to being on Substack led to the rewriting of our submissions guide and our publishing agreement. Both went live in mid-September.

The central through-line to our new policy is zero-tolerance for any AI generated text: “works that appear to be AI generated in whole, or in part, will be rejected on sight.” Of course, we have ways to elaborate on this, and back-end processes to make sure we apply it consistently. Authors must send us an AI declaration with their submission confirming that their words and your thoughts are their own, and AI has not been used to generate any text. We do permit strictly assistive uses of AI (such as light editing, etc.) and these must be declared if used and must not result in anything that materially reshapes/rewrites text (as that text would then be generative and trigger our zero-tolerance policy). This is an arms race of sorts, and a moving target, and we won’t get every decision right, but we want E-International Relations to be a place for humans who are reading and writing and learning from each other. That’s the bottom line. We understand that some people may feel the position we have arrived at is not a fit for their AI use cases, but they are, of course, welcome to seek publication elsewhere.

With hope, our small part in this big debate........

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