Feelings and emotions are the very heart of romance. Authors write about their feelings - whether they originate from personal felt experience or not - and readers connect with the stories that make them FEEL something.
Over the years, romance has broken ground on some outrageously impactful innovations - e-books, self-publishing are two that come to mind. Providing safe and fertile ground for readers to explore feelings is another. Now, we’re on the threshold of a generational evolution - outsourcing our feelings to AI.
Our FEELINGS on the use of AI are unambiguous.
At Theo Reads, we know the story is sacred. And it’s sacred not because of the words used to tell the story (“words are wind” - George RR Martin), but because the author felt something and found the right words to share it. That is irreplaceable and we will protect it always.
AI is a tool some of us use, and we support using it for the labor that surrounds storytelling - but never for the storytelling itself. That’s our policy in a nutshell; we get into the details below.
With love,
Parneet 🤍
Ok, let’s get into it.
The narrative prose that a reader experiences on Theo Reads must be written by a human being. This is our non-negotiable.
What does this mean?
Every story submitted to Theo Reads will include a simple attestation in the publishing flow. We’ll ask you to confirm: This story was written by me. The narrative prose is my original work and was not generated by AI.
This isn’t about policing authors. It’s about honoring the commitment we’re all making to each other that FEELINGS underlie every story.
Theo Reads creates covers for authors at no cost. We have made hundreds of covers for authors who otherwise would not have the resources to make them, and in some cases we use Canva-like tools for color editing, adding filters, removing the background, layering images etc. - similar to what authors already do on Canva. We believe cover design is part of the labor that surrounds storytelling - it helps readers find your work, although it is not the work itself.
When we bring audiobooks to Theo Reads, they will be narrated by humans. A voice performing a story is an act of emotional interpretation. That matters to us.
Some of the most passionate, most fearless storytelling in the world happens in languages that most of our readers have never read. We want those stories on Theo Reads.
If you wrote your story in another language and are submitting an English translation, that translation must be done by a human translator. A translator who has read your work, felt it, and made the thousand small decisions required to carry its emotional truth into another language.
AI translation is not permitted.
Keeping it real: there is no software right now that reliably detects AI-written stories. Detection tools produce false positives all the time, especially for non-native English speakers. We’re not going to subject our community to that.
Instead, we rely on what we’ve relied on from day one - human curation. Our editorial team will continue to read and review work (yes, it’s time-consuming, yes we’re a little overworked…but what a way to go!). If a reader or fellow author raises a concern about a story, we will review it carefully and have a direct, private conversation with the author.
This community is built on trust. We’d rather invest in relationships than surveillance.
We believe in fairness, proportionality, and giving people the chance to make it right. If we have concerns about a story’s origins:
Look, we don’t want it to come to that. We’d much rather this policy be something we never have to enforce… because the community holds itself to the standard.
AI is moving so, so fast. We’d be lying if we said we have all the answers today. This policy reflects where we stand right now, and we will revisit it as the technology and our community evolve.
What won’t change is the principle underneath: the story is sacred, and the feelings underlying the words are human.
[1] The concept of “the commons” is fascinating and uniquely suited to the community we’re building on Theo Reads. It comes from the work of Elinor Ostrom, a political economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for studying how communities successfully govern shared resources (shared resource in our case = reader attention and discovery) without top-down control. In our context, the commons is the shared trust, reputation, and reader attention that every author on Theo Reads benefits from and has a responsibility to protect. Ostrom found that the healthiest communities are the ones where members feel ownership over the shared resource - not just compliance with rules, but genuine care for what they’re building together. We’re building Theo Reads together.
