What “AI-Assisted” Actually Excludes

I like CRAFT. It is a good magazine, free to read and free to submit to, and its First Chapters Contest is the kind of thing a diligent novelist should want to enter. That is exactly why one line in the rules is worth stopping on, because I do not think it does what the people who wrote it meant it to do.

Here is the line: “AI-generated or -assisted submissions will be automatically disqualified. This includes using LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or similar) to translate your work.” It is not unique to the First Chapters Contest either. The same clause runs across CRAFT’s contests, so this is editorial policy, not a one-off.

The damage is in a single hyphen. “Generated or -assisted” reads as one idea, but it bolts together two things that are not remotely alike. Generation is a machine producing the work. Assistance is a writer producing the work with a tool that helps them get it onto the page. A ban that covers both treats a dyslexic author using text-to-speech to catch the typos they cannot see the same as someone who typed a prompt and pasted the answer. The word “assisted” is carrying an enormous load, and it was not built to carry it.

The translate clause gives the intent away. Singling out LLM translation lands hardest on writers for whom English is a second language, and on disabled writers using the same tools to close a gap that has nothing to do with honesty. The rule is aimed at a narrow worry, machine-made fiction passed off as a person’s, and it is written wide enough to catch the people least able to take the hit.

Here is the part that should give CRAFT pause. The same guidelines that carry this clause also say, plainly, that CRAFT values accessibility, that staying free to read and free to submit is a priority, that it works with all writers. I believe that. But an undifferentiated ban on “assistance,” with no carve-out for disability, sits directly against it. For a documented dyslexic or ADHD writer, assistive software is not an advantage. It is the ramp. Pulling the ramp and calling the result a level field is the oldest mistake in accessibility, and a magazine that lists accessibility as a value is the last place it should turn up.

None of this asks CRAFT to wave AI generation through. Keep that ban. It is the right call. The fix is to stop using one word for two things. Separate generation from assistance. Add an accessibility provision, the way research funders and publishers already have, where assistive use is allowed and, if you want it, disclosed. That is not a loophole. It is the difference between a rule that protects the contest and a rule that quietly screens out the writers your own values say you are for.

So, a direct ask, to the CRAFT editorial team and not to this year’s guest judge, who did not write the policy: revise the clause. Separate generation from assistance. Leave room for the writers who need the ramp.

I put the long version of this argument, the clinical research and the disability law sitting under it, over here. The short version is simpler. “AI-assisted” is not one thing. Written as though it were, it excludes the exact people accessibility is meant to include.

Carl Freeman writes The Faculty of Matter, a near-future dreampunk novel, and essays on writing with dyslexia and ADHD, the tools that make it possible, and the long haul of finishing a book.

Edited with AI