How we use AI

AI does the slow first pass: finding sources, pulling out facts and drafting sections. A person checks every section against the sources before anything is published, and every page says which of those happened to it.

• Proposes a plant's identity and flags ambiguous names.
• Researches sources from an allowlist and summarises them with citations.
• Extracts structured facts with a confidence level and a source for each.
• Proposes an outline and drafts each section as structured content.
• Generates photographs from prompts describing the plant or the task. They illustrate; they are never evidence.
• Flags its own weak spots: filler, false precision, missing climate context, unsupported claims.

• Publish. Only an admin publishes, and only after every AI-drafted section has been checked and approved by a person.
• Invent experience. Drafts never say “in my garden”.
• Decide facts. A fact enters the plant record only when an editor accepts it.

If we don't cover a plant yet, you can ask for a draft. It's marked “AI-generated draft, not yet reviewed”, is hidden from search engines, and may be wrong. Requests nobody turns into a guide are deleted after 30 days. When enough people ask for the same plant, an editor reviews the draft and, if it holds up, publishes it as a normal guide.

Drafts and images are made with third-party AI models. They receive the plant name, the research notes and the source text, never anything about you.

Each page shows one of: “Drafted with AI, checked by our editors”, “Editorially reviewed”, or “Reviewed by a horticulturist”. We don't claim expert review that didn't happen.