The Whetstone

What this house uses AI for, and what it does not

What AI is not used for

Illustration, cartography, music, vocals, mixing, mastering, layout and video editing. All of it is commissioned from people, by name, and paid for.

Ideas. The premise, the shape, the moral problem, what a thing is about. That is written before any tool is opened.

Deciding that something is finished. That decision is mine, every time.

What AI is used for

Drafting, in some of my own writing. I describe the thing I want, usually at length, and something comes back. I direct it and I rewrite it.

Checking. Sweeping a hundred thousand words for a rule I contradicted, catching a term that drifted between chapters, finding where page 40 disagrees with page 12.

House formats. Spelling, punctuation, and the things this house has decided about how it writes.

How the use is disclosed

Any offering that used these tools says so, in the back, in plain words. Not every offering does. Some are made without AI at all.

The tool is not in the credits. Credits are for people, and everyone who contributes to a Hounds & Jackals project is named there. The tools are disclosed separately, in the block below, adjusted to whatever a given work actually used.

Acknowledgements and Tools

Published under licence. Typefaces licensed for commercial use. Archival images in the public domain unless otherwise noted, with sources listed. Permissions granted are named here with thanks.

On artificial intelligence. Large language models were used in this work for drafting, for checking consistency across the manuscript, and for copy preparation. Everything was directed, rewritten and approved by Bruce Ballon, who decided what survived. Every illustration, map, photograph, and piece of music in this work was made by a named human being, credited above and paid for their work. The house’s full account of how it uses these tools is The Whetstone, at houndsandjackals.ca.

Credits, acknowledgements and homages

Where a work is inspired or built on somebody else’s, that is named. AWESOME credits Kirby and Zelazny because they are in there and I know they are. Every book carries the same kind of note for whatever it is standing on. Why the house works that way, and what is owed to the people a work came from, is Keep the Bones.

Review

The practice of using AI here will be reviewed on an ongoing basis and adjusted as fair and ethical use practices develop. This is how the work is made now. If that changes, this document changes with it.

The Grit is the reasoning underneath all of this: why the house discloses at all, what the tool actually does when it is working.