AI Disclosure

Transparency and trust matter here at the Unlikely Gardener, online on PHA, and to me personally. This page hpefully explains how and why AI factors into how this site actually gets built, and the information I provide.

Why I Use AI

I built this site because too much plant advice out there is Memaw's hand-me-downs dressed up as science. The whole point of UG is cutting through the myths and publishing what survives peer-reviewed scrutiny, not what's been repeated the most times by the loudest influencer. That takes real work: research, citations, and someone checking it against the actual literature instead of vibes.

AI doesn't replace any of that. It speeds up the parts of my job that don't need personal judgment so I can spend more time on the parts that do. Doctors and diagnosticians use AI to catch things faster and see farther. Researchers use AI to process data faster. I use AI to help surface and organize my research, clean up my notes, transcribe my thoughts, edit my writing, and keep the site's tools running smoothly across a technical landscape in perpetual change, the same way any professional reaches for whatever tool allows them to do the job at hand better. We all use tools for effectiveness and efficiency, and have since we sharpened a stick to protect us from something that wanted to eat us when we swung down from a tree and decided to walk upright.

How AI is Used

The Unlikely Gardener uses AI as a tool (already mentioned), not a substitute for expertise. Research still comes from peer-reviewed studies, product data sheets, and evidence, not guesswork. AI handles the redundant, time-consuming work: organizing research, checking citations against sources, the job a copy editor would do at a newspaper or magazine; catching spelling, grammar, and phrasing issues before publication. It's also used for certain programming and website optimization tasks behind the scenes, like coding, application testing, code refactoring, optimizing functional aspects of the site, including tools like the Energy Cost Calculator, the VPD and DLI calculators, and the PPFD/PAR Map Generator.

Every claim, every recommendation, and every fact still gets verified against real science by a human (me) before it goes live. If a myth needs busting, I decided, based on my own assessment or a request from a PHA member or blog reader, that it needed busting, and I wrote the article. AI just helped clean it up and get it there faster.

Generative AI and Imagery

Some of the illustrative imagery on this site starts from my own foundational creative work: personal sketches, my own photography, and my own Photoshop and Illustrator work, which I then use as the basis for generating a wider variety of illustrative visuals. It's an extension of work I'm already doing by hand, not a replacement for it.

What generative AI is never used for: suggesting plant health outcomes, results, or before-and-after claims. If an image implies a plant recovered, thrived, or responded a certain way to a product or technique, that image is real, my own photography of my own plants, not a generated approximation of an outcome. Illustrative graphics stay illustrative. They're there to explain a concept, not to serve as evidence that something worked.

What AI Does Not Do

AI doesn't decide what's true, doesn't pick which myths get busted, and doesn't get final say on anything published here. It doesn't test products, doesn't have opinions on why your Alocasia is being dramatic again, and it definitely doesn't outrank peer-reviewed research. That part stays entirely on me.

On Originality, Resources, and Why This Approach Makes Sense

I've spent 35 years in advertising and communications: as an agency owner, a creative art director, a writer, an artist, a 3D animator, and a post-secondary educator training the next wave of people going into this field. I'm not approaching AI as someone who doesn't understand what's lost when creative work gets devalued. I'm approaching it as someone who's hired artists, priced out original illustration work, taught art and design students, and made a living from original creative for most of my adult life. That background is exactly why I think this deserves a real answer instead of a dismissive one.

On originality: The illustrative imagery on this site isn't typcially built from a blank prompt pulling from someone else's portfolio. It's built from my own sketches, my own photography, and my own Photoshop and Illustrator work, my own foundational creative, used as the basis for generating variations and expansions of that work. It's an extension of what I'm already making by hand, using the same eye and the same standards I spent 35 years developing, not a substitute for someone else's.

On resources: AI systems have a real environmental cost, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But so does everything else you're already using without a second thought. Basic search, driving directions and maps, food delivery apps, ecommerce product recommendations, the computational photography your phone uses every time you take a picture, Instagram's plugins and filters, and yes, Facebook itself, which now uses AI to rewrite post headlines and decide what fills everyone's feed. If you complained about "AI" today and did any of that this week, that's not a gotcha, it's just where we all live now. Objecting to AI in 2026 while using a smartphone is a little like objecting to electricity while charging that same phone. Unless you're living an Amish lifestyle or you're a hermit on a mountaintop conversing with goats, you're already part of this system in a dozen invisible ways. My use of it here is simply visible.

As for the sustainable alternative people picture, commissioning original illustration for every calculator, every glossary entry, every article, indefinitely, on a one-person operation's budget: I know what that costs, because I've bought it and sold it for three and a half decades. That alternative isn't more sustainable, it's not sustainable at all. The honest choice here isn't "AI vs. a hired illustrator." It's "AI-assisted imagery vs. no imagery," because the second option was never actually on the table for a site this size.

On "stealing work": Nobody's job disappeared because of how I use an image as a feature for a blog post. I never had the budget to commission original art for this site in the first place, so that work didn't exist for anyone to lose.

Why This Matters

AI is used across nearly every industry now: medicine, engineering, research, small business, because it's genuinely useful when it's used honestly. I'd rather tell you plainly how it factors into this site than let you assume, or pretend a one-person operation with 55 years of plant obsession and a healthy dose of ADHD does everything by hand out of some sense of purity. Using good tools responsibly is what professionals do. Hiding it is what people with something to hide do.

Got questions about how any of this works? Same place as always:

info@unlikelygardener.com