The Manchester Home for Wayward Women will be holding its annual Halloween Masked Ball on Friday at 8 p.m. In order to avoid the disorders the Home experienced last year, this year a limited number of tickets will be sold to interested gentlemen at silent auction beginning 9 a.m. this morning at the Matron’s office.

Enoch Winterburton and His Not Labeled for Individual Sale Orchestra will be playing at Heptagon Gardens Thursday and Friday nights. For the fifth week in a row, Mr. Winterburton’s orchestra has been at the top of the country-western charts with their unexpected hit, “She’s Just a Cowboy’s Daughter, but Oh! Those Pasture Eyes.”

The Three Rivers Solitaire Club will hold its semifinals Saturday at 2 p.m. over Google Meet.

Lawn bowling at McKinley Park has been canceled indefinitely until the Hilltop Lawn Bowling Association can find someone to get the mud out of the pinsetter.

We see a lot of AI policies these days, and we’ll see more of them for a while. These policies are published in magazines and literary sites in a flailing attempt to define the limits of acceptable use for artificial intelligence. Some fora ban AI altogether. Others try to draw lines around the permitted uses of AI—you may use it for brainstorming and editing, but not composition; you may use it on Tuesday afternoons, but not Thursday mornings.

Here, for example, are AI policies for the Yale Review (427 words), Elsevier journals (2,653 words, but they have a separate policy for books), and Bloomsbury Publishing (2,432 words).

Dr. Boli predicts that these policies will multiply for a while, and then gradually recede and vanish as AI becomes the normal means of producing text, and the small number of eccentrics who still think for themselves begin to realize that the world has moved on. In the future, in fact, human composition will be restricted by similar policies, because it will be considered unprofessional and even dangerous to release text to the public if it has not been composed by a reliable bot. For example, the European Union has put laws in place that require disclosure of AI-generated content if it is published to inform the public on matters of public interest—unless it has gone through human editorial review. This will seem backwards in ten or twenty years, and regulations will start to require that human-generated content be disclosed unless it has been reviewed by a competent bot.

Meanwhile, in this brief moment when AI policies are the expected norm in literary publications, Dr. Boli has decided to publish one for his own Magazine.

It may surprise some readers to find that Dr. Boli will not just ban AI outright, even in his own publication. But he has no objection to the use of AI where it is beneficial. For Dr. Boli in particular, AI is beneficial in a small number of circumstances, such as transcribing text from a scanned page, or translating a language he does not understand. Composing written text is not one of those beneficial uses. It will always be easier for Dr. Boli to write what he means than to explain to a bot how it should write what Dr. Boli means. But there may come a time when Dr. Boli will have a bot write an article so that he can mock the bot’s writing style. For example, he had briefly thought of having one of the bots write this AI policy, just because the results seemed likely to be amusing, and because it would be “very meta,” as they say. As a rule, with the exceptions mentioned, the main uses Dr. Boli can see for AI bots are uses that lead to mocking the bots, and he reserves that liberty for himself and will not deprive himself of it by a hasty promise not to use AI.

It is Dr. Boli’s prediction that artificial intelligence will be used here seldom if at all. But a prediction is different from a policy. The latter is a promise to readers, not just a guess about what Dr. Boli’s mood might be on some future occasion.

So here is Dr. Boli’s policy for artificial intelligence in his own Magazine:

We will never make use of artificial intelligence to compose text or to create illustrations without clearly stating that we have done so.

That is the whole policy. It is brief, and its brevity is made possible by its simplicity. It ignores the question of which uses for artificial intelligence are legitimate, and it can afford to ignore that question because a strict application of the policy makes it possible for readers to decide the answer for themselves.

It also meets the strictest European regulations. There is probably a lesson here: instead of combing the language of the law to see what we can get away with, every once in a while it is less effort to understand what the law is for.