The Throughline AI Commitment: A Human-Written Newsletter, Always.
How we do and do not use this emerging technology.
Nothing in my lifetime has changed journalism and writing as radically and rapidly as AI. The technology is in many ways exciting. But for creative fields, it’s also potentially devastating.
So I wanted to be transparent about how we here at Throughline use (and will use) AI.
The first thing to know is that this newsletter is and will always be written by a human. I do not use AI to draft, edit, or otherwise touch the prose that you see here, and I expect other Throughline contributors to do the same.
To the best of my knowledge, I use real photographs to illustrate these posts. I do not use AI-generated images. The exception here is if an AI-generated image is included in the photo sites I use for images (Unsplash and Wiki Commons) and isn’t labeled as such. But I will not intentionally use AI-generated images here.
I do not use AI to create our social media content. I do use Canva, which has AI functionality that as far as I know I don’t utilize. I had a real person design Throughline’s logo and social media templates; I have a real person who helps me translate the posts I write into those social media templates (I also do it myself a lot of the time). I post Throughline-related tweets, YouTube videos, and Instagram and Facebook posts myself. The same holds true for my writing retreat business: A real person did the branding and design; a real person inputs the images and posts on Instagram.
I do not use AI to replace any of the human creation that makes writing and other creative work good and interesting.
I do occasionally use AI for research. But here is specifically what that means: I do not tell Chat GPT to “find the research I need for a post on young men and sports betting” — that is the kind of broad delegation of cognition that I am just not going to do. Instead, my primary use of AI for research is that I admittedly look at the little Google AI box that pops up when you do a Google search now. A handful of times I have used AI to try to find a very specific fact or study that numerous Google searches failed to turn up (this is only successful about 25% of the time). I would estimate that I’ve done this a grand total of roughly a dozen times in the past year.
And that’s it.
I am sure this makes me sound like a dinosaur. I’m ok with that. AI is a transformative technology and I have no doubt that a lot of good will come from it — but it also threatens to transform us into people who simply don’t use the brains in our heads as often as we should. I do not want to read words generated by AI, and I sure do not want them published anywhere near my name.
The human brain is a beautiful thing, and I’d prefer to not to contribute to my own atrophying. Human creation is a beautiful thing, and I don’t want to turn any more of it over to the robots.
xx Jill
Thank you for committing to the creativity, ingenuity and beauty of human endeavor. In an episode of South Park Mr. Garrison finds out his students are using Chat GPT to write their papers. He is outraged not because they are doing it but, instead, because he realizes he has been reading and grading papers for no reason; Chat GPT can do it for him. And so it goes.
And this is why we love and adore you, Jill!