AI Content Disclosure
vaeyc covers AI learning tools, so it is especially important that we are transparent about our own use of AI in the editorial process. This page explains exactly what AI does and does not do here.
Why This Page Exists
vaeyc is an editorial publication focused in part on helping readers understand and critically evaluate AI learning tools. We believe that credibility in this space requires us to apply the same transparency standards to our own operations that we ask our readers to apply to the tools we cover. This page is our public commitment to that standard.
What AI May Assist With
vaeyc authors may use AI tools as part of their editorial workflow in the following limited and supervised ways:
- Research assistance — using AI-powered search or summarization tools to surface academic papers, identify sources, or get a quick overview of a topic before deeper reading. All sources are then independently verified by the human author; AI-generated source summaries are never published directly.
- Fact-check suggestions — using AI tools to flag potential inconsistencies or prompt the author to check a claim. The human author verifies every flagged item against primary sources.
- Outlining and structure — brainstorming article structure or section headings to help an author organize their thinking. The final structure is chosen and shaped by the human author.
- Grammar and style review — using AI-assisted grammar tools (similar to Grammarly or Hemingway Editor) to review prose for clarity, grammar, and style. The human author approves or rejects every suggested change.
What AI Never Does at vaeyc
The following uses of AI are prohibited at vaeyc, without exception:
- Generating article prose — no article or section of an article on vaeyc is written by an AI. All prose is drafted and rewritten by a named human author.
- Fabricating citations or statistics — AI tools are known to hallucinate plausible-sounding but non-existent sources. vaeyc authors are required to verify every cited source directly; AI-suggested citations that cannot be independently confirmed are never used.
- Creating author bios or credentials — author bios reflect the real backgrounds of real people on the vaeyc team. We do not use AI to generate or inflate credentials.
- Fabricating quotes or attributed statements — quotes in vaeyc articles are real statements from real people, sourced from verifiable interviews, publications, or public records. AI-generated quotes are never published.
- Publishing AI-generated images as original photography — where AI-generated imagery is used as illustration, it is labeled as such. We do not represent AI-generated images as photographs.
Disclosure in Articles
When an article involves substantive AI assistance beyond routine grammar review — for example, if an AI tool was used to help analyze a dataset or compare product features — this will be disclosed in the article itself, typically in an editor’s note at the bottom of the piece.
Why Transparency Here Matters
Many online publications in the AI and ed-tech space use AI tools to generate content at scale while representing that content as human editorial work. vaeyc explicitly does not do this — and we believe readers deserve to know the difference. Because our editorial mission includes helping readers develop the critical skills to evaluate AI-generated content, it would be fundamentally incoherent for us to publish AI-generated content uncritically ourselves. We model the transparency we teach.
Questions about our AI practices can be directed to [email protected].