Anti-AI Anthology Submission Guidelines

Anti-AI Anthology

This upcoming collection of prose, poetry and visual art is intended to present new narratives and experiences which challenge both the inevitability and the value of Artificial Intelligence as we’re currently (and potentially) seeing it mobilised.

Unrepentantly anti-AI - we’re looking to represent different perspectives through both direct critiques and re-imaginings of our engagement with AI in particular, technology in general and society as we experience it.

A non-profit effort - we’re volunteer run and intend to share the final creation as widely and openly as we can (excluding AI training, of course).

We’re not framed by any one genre or style and hopefully this will be an eclectic and adventurous collection!

Submission guidelines are below and we’ll have a deadline for those on the 29th of May 2026.

We’re also looking for other volunteers with roles listed below the submission guidelines.

Contact details:

Submissions or expressions of interest can be sent here. Please title your email Submission - Visual Art/Poetry/Prose/other.

There’s also a Zulip board here for general discussions and working groups.

If you just want to be kept up to date on when the anthology is actually released you can also subscribe to this site on the main page and news will be sent out as and when things happen.

Submission Guidelines:

Note: Given the hard press on AI hype at the moment, especially at management and institutional levels, contributors are welcome to submit under a pseudonym if they want to. Just make it clear in your submission that you want to do that.

The submission review process will be dependent on volunteer interest in editor and reviewer roles, with the duties delegated accordingly by the organiser.

Submission Format:

.docx or .odf file submissions are preferable. Artwork should initially be submitted as samples so smaller .jpeg or .png files, print ready versions may be requested at a later date.

Prose - max word count - 2,000 words.

Poetry – Up to 3 pieces with a 1 page limit for each.

Visual Art - 5 piece submission limit but please note we have limited capacity to add visual work (bearing the printed component in mind) so if you do send a coherent body of work we may select one specific piece to use rather than a whole set.

With visual art also consider that any hard copies produced won’t be in colour, even if we have more flexibility with the main digital copy, so any submissions should be usable for both. If unsure then please stick to black and white pieces.

Anti-Data Harvesting Solutions - Another area for submissions is around data protection solutions for this collection. Obviously anything put online will, likely, be subject to data harvesting. If you have any ideas, technical or creative, for pushing back against that potential then let us know! Where possible we’re happy to build safeguards in wherever possible, from data poisoning techniques through to creative (mis)uses of design that keep work accessible to the human but not to the machine.

Additional volunteers:

If you’re interested in editing, reviewing or otherwise contributing to the project in addition to/instead of submitting your creative work then absolutely get in touch.

AI Usage

Unsurprisingly we have a zero-AI policy for submissions, any work suspected of using generative AI will be rejected immediately.

If you use AI due to issues with formatting, structure or English being a second language then don’t feel put off from submitting! We’ll be organising community editors who can help edit your work. It’s important to show that where AI erases voices to ‘normalise’ the output humans can help with problems while maintaining your original voice in the work.

Bigotry

Again unsurprisingly any work promoting any form of bigotry will be rejected immediately. If you’re presenting perspectives on lived experiences then that is, of course, fine but anything that looks to promote or validate harms against marginalised or minority groups will be binned immediately.

Tone and Genre

This anthology is intended to be anti-AI. How you approach that is of course up to you, contributions can be fantastical, Luddite, de-tech, de-growth, utopian or anything else but our aim here isn’t to reconsider or art-wash conceptions of AI. If you’re interested in providing AI hype or excusing the extractive technologies we have then this isn’t the anthology for you.

For genre, there are no limits! All work will be considered.

Payment

This is an unpaid, non-profit community effort. Should any money become available via funding or other routes it will primarily be reinvested in expanding this (and future) projects but currently we’re not looking to apply for any money.

That said - we do want to encourage a direct relationship between authors/artists/organisers and audience so if you want to set up your own donation system then we’ll be more than happy to share links to it on both our main project site and via the digital copy of the anthology. We’re also in the process of looking into suitable donation platforms and will be able to recommend one in future. Obviously no one’s going to get rich from this but we certainly encourage readers to support creators and creators to benefit where they can.

Distribution

A digital copy of the anthology will be available for free download in both PDF and ePub formats.

An initially limited number of hard copies will be produced and sold at or near to cost with any profit included going towards additional ‘features’ for the book (infosheets, stickers, artwork etc included with purchase).

Additional methods of distribution (spoken word readings for example) are a slight possibility but if anything like that happens we’ll request additional permissions to use your work.

Previously Published Work

We’re not looking for work that has previously been released in other publications (collections, zines, books etc.) but we don’t include personal sites or social media in that.

Copyright

Contributors will retain all copyright over their work except for those permissions granted to the publisher for this anthology - namely the right for Say Yes, Do no to distribute the work as part of a collective publication.