The Society of Authors has pulled out of its own Charter of Ethical AI Use in the Creative Industries. The charter went up on October 13. This morning, October 21, members got an email thanking them for their feedback and telling them the SoA is withdrawing. About a week. Surprise.
Here’s the recap. The SoA built the charter with the Creators’ Rights Alliance in the UK, the Authors Guild in the US, the Australian Society of Authors, the Writers’ Union of Canada and the New Zealand Society of Authors. Kazuo Ishiguro and Tracy Chevalier backed it. The idea was that agents, publishers and prize bodies could sign up and pledge to use generative AI only in a “transparent, responsible and ethical way.” Then members blew up, partly because nobody asked them first and partly because, to a lot of them, “ethical AI” is a contradiction. On October 16 CEO Anna Ganley apologized and wrote that “there can never be any truly ethical use of generative AI.” Now the SoA says it will “pause, listen to members’ views,” run a survey, and talk next steps at its AGM on November 19. The charter itself is still live, and per The Bookseller nobody else has walked away yet.
So what happened? An organization tried to write down where the line is, and it couldn’t hold that line for a week. It’s not because they’re dumb people. It’s because the line was drawn in the wrong place. They tried to make the tool itself the ethical question. Is the model clean? Is the use approved? How much AI is too much? You can argue about that forever, and they will, at an AGM, in November.
The tool isn’t the ethics. A tool is what we made it for. I use it every day, and it makes me far more productive than I’d be otherwise. What’s actually wrong is slop and lying. If you dump a two-minute thought into a machine, slap your name on what comes out and sell it, that isn’t really yours, and no charter changes that. And if you tell people you did something you didn’t, that’s the problem. Not the software.
That’s the little world, and the reason Circle is being built the way it is.
Circle doesn’t hand you a rulebook with exact lines on it. We’d be withdrawing from it by Friday too. Instead, before your first submission you make one pledge: you’ll be honest about your AI use. Once. You don’t fill out a form for every piece and nobody asks you again. It’s your word. If somebody thinks you broke it, the Hall of Justice looks at it case by case, like adults.
The rest is the work. Members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted and get submitted right on the site. They walk reviewers through various lenses and push them to put down real feelings, not “nice job.” Writers revise and resubmit. The credit you earn can go to your own work or to somebody else’s. And no shit, that’s where the effort shows up: in the back and forth, the rewrite, the person who stuck around.
If AI out-writes you someday, fine. If being the best is the only reason you write, Circle can do without you. If you write because you want to make something and get better at it with other people, come on in.
Circle lives at gapoz.com, and the doors are opening now. Membership is limited and there’s no fee. Registration is open, subject to approval. Come meet people, make some friends, and grow your craft together.
Also on the beat
- On Marketplace, publishing journalist Jane Friedman says publishers are stuck on “what percentage of AI assistance crosses the line” while using AI themselves behind the scenes (Marketplace).
- The Authors Guild told publishers not to cancel books on a detector’s say-so and said authors shouldn’t have to prove they wrote their own books (Publishers Weekly).
- Korean publishers are pushing for a copyright trust body to stop AI “book theft” and get paid for books used in training (Seoul Economic Daily).
- YouTube’s “Human Creativity and AI” report says 72% of surveyed uploaders use AI, and most AI video posters put themselves in their videos (SocialDay).
- Runway Creative is now sold through Anthropic’s Claude Marketplace, with an agent that turns a brief into a finished video (Runway).
How this was made
AI assisted research and a first draft of this Circle View. A human reviewed, edited, and is accountable for the judgment and the final take.
