How we use AI, and where we don't.
We'd rather state this plainly than have you guess. Parts of this site are machine-assisted: the search, the illustrations, the code, and the short functional copy around the edges. Nothing with a byline is.
Everything with a byline
Every review, essay, article, story and book description is written by a person, and that person is named. Nothing with a byline is generated, paraphrased from a model, or run through one to be smoothed out. If a review says we read the book, we read the book.
The Underread's matching
The Underread is a search engine, and it uses a language model to match what you describe against our catalog. What it can recommend is fixed by hand: hundreds of books, every one read by us or vouched for by people in the industry we trust. The model picks from that shelf and explains its reasoning. It cannot invent a book, add one, or be paid to favour one.
Buttons, headings and ad copy
The short functional text around the site is a different thing from writing: labels, headings, page descriptions, ad copy. We decide what it says, and sometimes a model helps us tighten it to fit. We'd rather tell you that than pretend a button label is literature.
The illustrations
The illustrations on this site were made with AI assistance. A one-desk press can't commission original art for every page, and we'd rather spend what we have on paying authors. We're always open to hiring illustrators and animators, and when we can afford to commission work, we will, and we'll credit them by name.
Building the site itself
The code behind these pages was written with software assistance, the way most software now is. That's construction, not authorship. It shapes how the shelves are built, never what's written on the page.
If anything here reads like it was generated rather than written, tell us and name the page. We'll either defend it or pull it, and say which.