EIX's Editorial Guidelines for the Use of Generative AI Tools

The emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, and other platforms is creating new opportunities for developing written text, visual art, and other related artifacts in the publishing process. At EIX and FamilyBusiness.org, we welcome the development and use of these tools in the field of entrepreneurship, given their power to help entrepreneurs and those who support them create engaging new content to both reach and delight new customers. For example, we've recently published several pieces that explore the potential for AI to enhance entrepreneurship, including this general overview of the topic by David Townsend and this perspective from Steve Blank on AI and customer discovery. 

For authors and contributors who wish to submit articles, commentaries, and other types of submissions to either EIX.org or FamilyBusiness.org: You are welcome to use these tools to help draft, revise, and/or expand on your submissions before uploading the submission for review. However, before doing so, we wish to clarify our guidelines for the effective and fair use of the tools in the development of submissions to our platforms. 

First, if you use any AI tool such as a ChatGPT to help with any stage of the process in developing your submission, we require a technical note to be included at the bottom of the article that explains which tool(s) you used, how you used them, and the role the AI tool(s) played in developing the final draft of your submission. If you used a tool such as ChatGPT, BingAI, or another tool to generate the text, you must include the prompts you submitted to the system. 

Second, if you use generative AI to create any written text, graphs, pictures, etc. you must disclose any changes, revisions, or alterations you made to the document you submit to our platforms. 

Third, there are well-known challenges with generative AI tools “hallucinating” fake references, data, arguments, etc. It is the sole responsibility of the authorship team to verify all of the information in the article before it is submitted. We will flag any content that looks suspicious during our own review process, and any problems with the content will be grounds for the possible rejection of the submission. 

Fourth, there are significant concerns regarding the fair use of prior information and content that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other platforms use to train their AI systems. As a non-profit platform, we do not charge for our content, nor do we generate any commercial revenues from the content published on our platforms. Our sole aim is to publish evidence-backed content to help entrepreneurs and those who support them throughout the entrepreneurial process. It is therefore the sole responsibility of the authorship team to verify that their submission does not use prior content in an unethical fashion. Authors are responsible for properly referencing and citing prior work upon which their submission builds, and for not infringing on the copyrighted works of others. We require all authors to carefully vet the arguments, phrases, and content of their article with prior published content both in academic journals and in the practitioner literature to ensure they build fairly and ethically on prior published works. 

As generative AI tools and the technology landscape continue to evolve, it is likely that we will revise these Editorial Guidelines to promote the ethical use of these tools in research and publications. If you have any questions, please contact our Editor-in-Chief, Jon Eckhardt, or one of the Senior Editors of EIX or FamilyBusiness.org.