The Ethics of AI in Contests Editor: Jeff 
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About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff  and I'm one of the regular editors of the official Contest & Activities Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 500 newsletters across the site in that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me directly or submit feedback in the comment box at the bottom of this newsletter. |
The Ethics of AI in Contests
Running a contest takes a lot of work behind the scenes that the entrants never see. There's the time spent crafting the prompt, the expense of the prizes (for which many organizers spend time fundraising), the hours spent reading and evaluating every entry in good faith, etc. Which is why there's a particular frustration that sets in when you're working your way through a batch of entries and it becomes clear that some of them were submitted hastily and without care or concern for the effort you're investing in running the contest.
While AI-generated entries is the current manifestation of this frustration, it's hardly the first. Before AI, there were the handful of entrants who would submit something that clearly hadn't engaged seriously with the prompt, or ignored half the contest rules, and took a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" mentality to submitting. Over the years of running contests here on Writing.com, I've read entries that range from, "Well this was clearly written a couple hours before the deadline, and submitted without even a proofread" to "I'm not even sure the author read the prompt, and instead just submitted whatever was laying around in their port." The AI of it all isn't really a new problem; it's just the newest tool being used to further the same end (i.e., to spend as little time and effort as possible working on a contest entry).
Before we get to where I think the line should be drawn — because what would a newsletter about AI be without the editor proclaiming their own position on its use?  — it's worth acknowledging that AI involvement in writing exists on a spectrum, and not all of it is ethically equivalent.
On one end, you have writers who use AI the way they might use any other tool: running a draft through an AI-assisted grammar checker, using it to brainstorm when they're stuck, asking it to flag inconsistencies in plot or characterization. These, at least to me, are legitimate uses that don't feel meaningfully different from using spellcheck, consulting a thesaurus, or talking through an idea with a writing group. I wouldn't consider it unethical to workshop an idea with some friends or get feedback from them on an early draft to figure out how to tackle the next rewrite, so it's difficult for me to consider utilizing an AI to accomplish similar goals as inherently unethical, just because a machine is the one you're interfacing with.
On the other end, you have writers who prompt an AI to generate an entry, make minor edits (or not), and then submit it as their own work. Some will argue that there's value in training the AI model on your own writing so it can sound like you but, at the end of the day — at least to me — you're still outsourcing the actual writing to someone or something else. And that is an unethical thing for a writer to do without (a) proper attribution, and (b) in a context where that writer is competing against other writers for recognition, rewards, or prizes.
And in between those two poles, of course, there's a murky middle ground: writers who use AI to generate a detailed outline that they draft from in a paint-by-numbers kind of way, writers who feed their writing back into an AI and don't just ask it to proofread but to suggest better dialogue, improved scenes, etc.
To me, the AI issue starts to feel problematic at the point where the writer is outsourcing the actual writing. Not the brainstorming, not the editing, not the proofreading... but the actual writing itself. When you have AI generate an initial draft of something and then just come in and editing over the top of it, you're not writing... you're editing. If a writer were to take another human's work, use it as a foundation, and then just add their own customizations on top of it, most of us would consider that unacceptable professional practice for a writer if they were to then take sole credit for that work and/or enter it into a contest competing with other original stories.
The honest conversation about AI in contests has to come to terms with this spectrum of use, rather than treating all AI usage as the same thing.
A blanket "no AI" policy sounds clean and simple, but in practice it's both difficult to enforce and arguably overcorrects at the lighter end of the spectrum. And from personal experience, I can tell you that it creates a lot of confusion and the need to clarify for entrants when you inevitably get asked, "Wait, does that mean if I run it through a grammar checker, I'll be disqualified?" Or, "What if I just use it to help me flesh out the idea before I start writing?" In the current environment (where AI usage is on the upswing), it also encourages accusations of AI usage. Since the use of AI is often hard to prove (but does have some ever-evolving tendencies and patterns if you know where to look), a blanket "no AI, full stop" policy will likely get you the occasional objection that you have to mediate from time to time. "That story won over mine? But it has emdashes in it! It's clearly AI!"
The more useful question isn't whether AI was involved at all, but how it was involved. And specifically, who did the creative work.
Personally, my own position on AI is that it can be a legitimate tool for ideation, development, and proofreading, but that the line should be drawn firmly at having AI draft your entry for you. Especially when you're involved a creative writing competition like a contest. If you're submitting an AI-generated entry — however thoroughly you may be rewriting it — you're not offering up your own creative writing to be evaluated against another person's; you're pitting your editing skills against their creative writing skills. A writing contest should be a challenge among writers, with the goal being that you bring your creativity, your voice, your craft, and your interpretation of the prompt... and you see how that compares to what everyone else brought. When you submit an entry that you didn't write, whether it was generated by an AI, ghostwritten by a friend, or copied from somewhere else, you're not competing as a writer anymore.
I've heard the counterargument that AI is just a tool, and that a writer who knows how to use it is demonstrating a legitimate form of skill. There's something to that argument in other contexts. But in a creative writing contest, the ability being evaluated is the ability to write, not the ability to operate a tool that writes for you. Submitting AI-generated work to a creative writing contest is the same ethical problem as submitting anyone else's work, regardless of whether that anyone else is a person or a machine.
Think of it like a pie-baking competition. If you're going to enter into a contest to see who can bake the best pie, there probably won't be many objections to you saying that you looked up a recipe online, or got one from your great-great-grandma's hand-me-down recipe book. You probably aren't going to get dirty looks if you tell them you baked a few test pies first, and had your friends over to sample them and give you pointers on what could be improved. But if you admitted that you went to a bakery one town over, bought a pie out of their display case, and then repackaged it in your own pie tin and maybe sprinkled a little lemon zest on top for goot measure... you better believe there will be people who take offense to that. Because you entered a pie-baking competition against other pie-bakers and you didn't bake your own pie. No matter how much you embellish the final product, it was created by someone who wasn't you.
Now, I also want to spend a moment on something that doesn't get discussed enough in these conversations, because it's the part of this issue that I find most troubling as a contest entrant.
There's a meaningful difference between competing against other writers and competing against other people's ability to optimize AI output for a specific judge's preferences. A sophisticated AI user doesn't just ask the machine to generate a random story for them; they give the AI input to consider. At this point, a sophisticated AI user isn't just saying, "Hey ChatGPT, here's a bunch of stories I've written. Write one in the style of me to address this prompt." They're saying, "And in addition to that, maybe study the judge's stated tastes, their past winner selections, their feedback patterns, heck maybe even their reviews. Engineer a story that's calibrated to this judges' personal tastes and preferences."
"Creative" writing via AI isn't an exercise in creative writing, not really. It's a targeting exercise, to see if you can get the output to match the stated objectives as closely as possible.
When you put time and genuine effort into a contest entry, you're making creative choices: about interpretation, about voice, about what risks are worth taking. When someone else engineers an AI prompt designed to reverse-engineer the judge's preferences, you're not really competing in the same contest anymore. They're playing a different game entirely, and the fact that it can be difficult to tell the difference from the outside makes it worse, not better.
I want to be honest about something here: there is no perfect solution to this problem. AI detection tools are unreliable, easily fooled, and raise their own set of fairness concerns. They produce false positives with some regularity, which means using them as an enforcement mechanism risks penalizing legitimate entrants. It also often requires feeding someone else's work into an AI to "detect AI" usage which is an ethical dilemma in and of itself without the author's permission to use their work in that way. Any policy an organizer puts in place is going to be imperfect.
That said, imperfect policies are still worth having, because they communicate values even when they can't guarantee compliance. A clear, specific AI policy in your contest rules does a few things. It tells entrants where you stand. It gives you a legitimate basis for disqualification if something looks obviously generated. And perhaps most importantly, it signals to your community what kind of contest you're running and what kind of participation you're inviting.
My recommendation for organizers is to be specific rather than just saying "no AI." Clarify what you mean; something along the lines of, "AI may be used for brainstorming, editing, and proofreading, but the prose of your entry must be your own original work" is more honest about the spectrum and more defensible in practice than a blanket prohibition that nobody can meaningfully enforce.
Disclosure requirements are also worth considering. Asking entrants to confirm that their entry represents their own original work puts the ethical responsibility on the entrant where it belongs, and makes clear that submitting AI-generated work is a violation of the contest's terms, not just its spirit. On WdC, this can be accomplished via a submission process that involves a Survey Form with a disclaimer check box, or even a posted statement in a contest forum header which states that, by submitting an entry in the forum, the entrant accepts and acknowledges the statement in the forum.
It's worth stepping back and remembering what contests are actually for. Yes, there are prizes. But the deeper purpose of a creative writing contest is the practice of writing to a prompt, the feedback loop of having your work evaluated, the experience of seeing how your creative choices compare to someone else's. An AI-generated entry opts out of all of that even when it wins. The writer didn't practice anything. They didn't make creative choices. They didn't get better. They just got a prize.
And that, more than any fairness argument, is why I think this matters. Contests exist to make writers better and to celebrate what writers can do. When we treat them as prize delivery mechanisms to be optimized rather than creative challenges to be genuinely engaged with, we lose something that's a lot more valuable than whatever's paid out to the winners of a given contest round.
Until next time,
Jeff
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Feedback from "Contests & Activities Newsletter (April 8, 2026)" about writing a great contest entry:
Excellent advice and a good starting point for any answer to a prompt. I would just add a warning not to expect recognition for even the best and most original work. That's in the hands of the contest owner and their tastes can vary considerably. Better is to write, not only for the competition, but more from the point of view of adding quality to one's portfolio. After all, if we're all going to be discovered post mortem, we should provide plenty of good stuff for adoring fans to read through!
— Beholden 
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Contests & Activities: May 06, 2026 Issue [#13729]
