Written by people

The pledge

When you publish a post here you confirm one thing: you wrote it. Not a model with your name on it. You.

Use whatever helps you write. A spellchecker, a search engine, a friend who reads drafts, an AI you ask questions. The words that reach your readers are still yours.

Quoting an AI

Sometimes the machine is the subject, or it said something worth showing. Quote it, the way you would quote anyone, and label it. Start a quote with a line that says [ai], or [ai: Claude] to name the tool:

> [ai: Claude]
> The text the model produced.

On the web and in email it comes out as a marked block that says Generated by AI. The editor's AI button does the same thing. A labeled quote inside your own piece is fine. A piece that is mostly machine text, labeled or not, is not.

What readers see

Each post published under the pledge carries a small line, "Written by a person", next to its date, on the web and at the foot of the email. AI quotes inside it are labeled where they appear. Posts imported from elsewhere, or published before this page existed, show nothing either way.

How it is kept

• There is no detector. None of them work well enough to accuse someone with, so we don't use one.
• A reader who thinks a post breaks the pledge can email hello@usepub.com with the link. A person looks, and asks the writer.
• A post that plainly breaks it comes down. A publication that keeps breaking it is closed. This is in the terms too.

About the software

Pub itself was built with help from AI tools. The pledge is about the words readers subscribe to, not the code that delivers them.

Why

Machine text is free, endless and everywhere. What a reader gives you, money or attention, is for a person who thought about something and wrote it down. That is what Pub is for.