Zine makers stake out an anti-AI position as DIY publishing pushes back
TL;DR: Zine creators including London’s Polyester, the Black-creative print zine Sweet-Thang and Melbourne illustrator Maddie Marshall are making generative AI an explicit ethical and stylistic line in their work. Some are publishing anti-AI zines; others are running AI-detection checks on submitted writing before publication. The friction points to a broader question for UK creative industries: how grassroots publishing chooses to position itself as commercial publishing leans further into AI tooling.
Zines have long sat at the front edge of cultural movements — punk, queer activism, riot grrrl, Black feminism — typically self-published on cheap paper with small print runs. The Guardian reports that AI is now generating its own version of the format’s perennial authenticity debate.
Where the lines are being drawn
Ione Gamble, founder of London-based feminist arts zine Polyester, told The Guardian her publication runs all submitted articles through an AI detector to catch AI-generated writing. Sweet-Thang founder Zoe Thompson framed the appeal of zines as the slowness of human creation — something AI’s speed undermines by design. Melbourne-based Maddie Marshall spent a year producing a 92-page anti-AI zine she now sells on Etsy.
The picture is not uniform. Designer Jesse Pimenta and writer Cheyce Batchelor used Figma’s AI to lay out a 90s-themed zine, citing reduced cognitive load. IT engineer Steve Simkins used ChatGPT to generate the HTML for a photo zine. Both examples are online-only — physical zine culture remains the harder line. MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie said AI-using zines he had encountered tended to deploy the technology knowingly, often to demonstrate its limits.
Looking forward
The zine response is a useful pressure test for what authenticity-led UK creative businesses might do as AI becomes a baseline. For UK SMEs in publishing, design and music — particularly those whose pricing is built on craft positioning — the question is becoming less “should we use AI?” and more “do we tell our customers when we don’t?” Polyester’s submission-side AI detection is the more interesting move: a publisher-side editorial control that mirrors how some art-school programmes are starting to verify student work. Whether AI-detection holds up commercially as the underlying detectors get noisier is a separate question — but the demand signal from creators is now visible enough that platforms targeting craft markets will need a position on it.