Let’s Talk About *That* Article

It recently came to our attention that a piece we selected and published in our 2026 Pride package, submitted by Beatrix Kondo, was written using AI. We did not know it at the time of publication and the author claimed both pre and post-publication that they did not use AI. While there isn’t a 100% accurate or perfect way to check for an article being AI generated, we have done a thorough review of the piece’s draft and we feel confident that generative AI was used in some way to write this article. The piece has been pulled from our Patreon and the website, and we will not be working with this writer again in the future.

At Uppercut, we’re committed to ideas and writing that punch up, written by humans, for humans. The landscape we’ve returned to has changed a lot in regard to artificial intelligence, and we didn’t realize how unprepared we were for that. Our goal is, and always has been, to give marginalized writers a chance to have a platform, but with that now comes additional risk of AI fraudsters trying to take advantage of that openness. We run with one editor contracting a small number of pieces that we think will be great, and the last thing we want is to be publishing AI content instead of insightful pieces from real people.

To that end, here are the steps we’re taking going forward:

• An explicit ban of any generative AI use in our pitching guide.
• More thorough vetting of authors for any association with past generative AI usage in publication during the pitching process.
• Running all drafts through AI detection tools that allow for video review of the drafting process.
• A separate, manual AI detection editing pass before further editing work starts, using the Bona Books AI report as a guide.

We’re a small outlet looking to return to form in publishing great stories, and while we’re taking this on the chin, we want to be a place that people can trust to not run AI. It is paramount to us that Uppercut remains free of generative AI pieces, as we want to remain a place where awesome, human writers can share their voices. This vigilance should keep us up to date with an ever-changing games media landscape and we hope to continue putting out important work.