Some number of people who sent letters to the editor for this week’s issue are going to be offended. They should not be. Allow me to explain.
The Star’s letters policy is quite liberal in that we print every letter we receive so long as it is unique, not submitted or posted elsewhere, and — to the extent possible for us to determine — not the work of others.
Legal issues matter, too. As angry as writers may be about one thing or another, they cannot definitively say that anyone else is guilty of a crime unless proven. Plagiarizing is another hard no; letters that contain lengthy quotations will be returned for revision to the person submitting them.
There is an honor system of sorts. Writers are expected to be self-policing.
Long letters, those of about 800 words and up, will appear on our pages as space is available. We do not say when and encourage heavy-fingered types to either be patient or take a crack at cutting things down.
Artificial intelligence has made our job of sorting the letters a lot more difficult. In school settings, A.I. writing is considered plagiarism. We agree. Letters are supposed to be the readers’ space, and we work hard to allow the writers to be heard in their own voices.
Letters are edited to remove unfamiliar abbreviations and correct capitalization and punctuation. Rarely do we change words or the order of paragraphs.
Even apparently nonsensical letters are allowed, too. As my late mother explained, though we might not be able to know what certain writers’ points were, their letters made sense to them. Similarly, we go easy on adding editor’s notes, using them only for the most glaring errors of fact or where a writer’s identity or affiliations would otherwise be a mystery to readers.
There is nothing we can do about letters based on shared talking points. As long as the wording is unique, writers may hit the same points even in the same order as in another writer’s letter — something there was a lot of this election cycle. What is not okay is copy-and-paste.
For example, this week, someone duplicated someone else quite baldly. Neither fessed up, so we printed the letter that arrived first and tossed the other.
Something must be said about the indignation among some of our correspondents who act outraged when called on their use of A.I. Of late, I have begun running suspect letters through several of the available A.I. checkers. If any of them come back as more than a quarter A.I.-written I have been letting the supposed writer know and asking for an original, human-typed version or revision where possible.
No matter how grammatically precise, computer writing sounds to my ear soulless all the same, and it’s not welcome in these pages.