How AI Is Used Here
Effective August 24, 2026 · Last updated August 24, 2026
The short version
Yes, AI is used to make these packets. It is used for drafting and for research, it is used a lot, and pretending otherwise would be insulting.
Here is what it does not do. It does not decide what goes in a packet. It does not get taken at its word about a fact. It never sees anything about your students, because nothing about your students is collected in the first place. And no packet is ever written about a book I have not read myself, cover to cover, before a word is drafted.
That last rule is the one that matters most, so the rest of this page is mostly about how it is enforced.
Who is writing this
The Fiction Laboratory is one person. I am Cory Ottenwess, a graphic designer of about thirty years, training to teach high school biology. Everything here goes out under my name, which means every error in it is mine and not a machine's.
What AI actually does
It drafts
Section prose, quiz questions, discussion prompts. I direct it, argue with it, rewrite it, and cut a good deal of it.
It searches and organizes
Finding candidate sources, pulling a figure out of a paper, indexing what is in a research folder, keeping a database consistent.
It writes the small tools
The scripts that build a question bank out of a document, or generate a book page, or check a packet for problems before it goes to layout.
If you are reading a sentence in one of these packets, there is a reasonable chance a model produced a version of it first. I am telling you that plainly because I would want to be told.
What it is never allowed to do
Write about a book I have not read
This is absolute and it is the whole foundation. Every title in the library carries a read status, and a packet cannot be started until that status is verified. Books I read decades ago do not count until I have read them again. Books I only know through adaptations or graphic novels do not count. Two titles are currently blocked for exactly this reason, and they will stay blocked until I have reread them, however inconvenient that is.
Be a source
AI research output is treated as unreliable by default. It is used to find sources, never to be one. Every load-bearing fact in a packet is checked against the actual thing: the novel itself, a published paper, a named interview. When a research summary and the book disagree, the book wins, and this happens often enough that it is a routine step rather than an exception.
Recent examples from my own working notes include an invented detail about a novelist's doctoral supervision, a teacher's name that turned out to be uncorroborated, and a claim about which article of a treaty a plot point rests on. All three were caught by opening the primary source. None of them reached a packet.
Grade anything, or touch a student
No packet contains software. Nothing phones home. The quiz is paper, the answer key is paper, and the grading is yours.
Design the thing
Every page of every packet is laid out by hand, by me, in Affinity Publisher.
Your students' data
None of it is collected, so none of it goes anywhere, including into a model.
There is no login, no account, no analytics on this site, and no software in the packets. The one piece of information this site will ever hold is an email address, and only if you type it in yourself to be told when packets are ready. The full details are on the privacy page.
If your district requires a vendor questionnaire before you can use classroom materials, this is the short answer: there is no student data because there is no data collection.
Art and illustration
Nothing here is generated by AI. Not the page design, not the type, not a single image.
The layout is built by hand in Affinity Publisher. Where artwork comes from outside, it is licensed from the human being who drew it. If an illustrator is commissioned for original work, they are paid and credited by name.
Why bother saying any of this
Two reasons. The first is that you are a teacher deciding whether to put something in front of a class, and you deserve to know how it was made. A vague answer is worse than a blunt one.
The second is more specific to this project. A curriculum built on science fiction novels is asking students to think carefully about technology, including this one. It would be a poor look to do that while being cagey about the tools on my own desk.
The honest position is that these are useful tools with real failure modes, that the failure mode I care most about is confident invented detail, and that the defense against it is not avoiding the tools. It is reading the book, opening the source, and checking.
Changes
This page will be updated when the practice changes. Questions go to Inquiries@fictionlaboratory.com.
Written to be read, not to be defensible in the abstract. If something here is unclear or looks wrong, say so and it gets fixed.