About Our Content

We write our own stuff. It’s that simple. While we appreciate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many places, we believe it has zero place in the world of plant medicine information and content-creation.

Why are We 100% Human-Generated?

We’re glad you asked! 

It takes a lot of time, energy, dedication, and perseverance to build the kind of herbal knowledge that makes great herbalists and herbal teachers. The folk who write for us, ourselves included, have dedicated themselves to creating a strong and healthy relationship with the Plant Nation, that being the plants and herbs we work with and write or teach about. Like all good relationships, we’re engaged with the ways in which The Plants can teach us and we are in constant conversation with them with regard to how we can be beneficial to each other.

AI just cannot do that. It isn’t nearly sophisticated enough or corporeal enough to actually observe first-hand and build the relationship and knowledge base necessary to do The Plants justice in written communication. 

What about AI Scrapers? Don’t they glean all the information and use it to write good stuff, too?

That is debatable. We argue AI scrapers are more like thieves who take information that was intended to be given freely to all of humanity and use it to tell their own story, one that’s often not rooted in reality or practicality.

AI systems, like chat GBT or Google’s AI search engine, are profit-driven entities; they are designed as subscription services or to drive traffic and interest in a profitable direction for their creators. That’s not necessarily all bad, and it certainly can be helpful to people looking to learn about specific topics. 

When it comes to learning about The Plants, though, we believe human-created content deserves to be rewarded, too.

When humans use the AI tools offered by search engines or through subscriptions to learn about The Plants, we do a disservice to the people who’s written words were scraped by those AI tools. AI scrapers have most certainly scraped The Practical Herbalist, and we most definitely have not been paid for that service. 

Even if you set the money and profit-arguments aside, AI has demonstrated most clearly it can and does get stuff wrong. AI makes up stuff regularly. Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious, but sometimes it’s not. We believe using AI to generate content about Herbal Medicine and The Plants is risky. How do you know if the sources AI used were reliable? How do you recognize when AI’s information is blatantly wrong if you don’t have the benefit of your own first-hand experience or a trusted teacher to ask? 

At The Practical Herbalist, we are committed to supporting human-created content.

You will not find AI-generated content on our website, in our podcasts or videos, or in our published books (both our digital and our hard-copy books). 

Will We Ever Use AI for Anything? 

Yes, actually, we do use AI in one space and one space specifically, social media. We label all our social media posts that have been created using AI tools with an icon so you know that AI was a part of the creative team. (It looks like this: .)

We use AI to generate social media posts mainly because we’re a tiny team (often of just one) and creating content is our passion. Marketing is the hard part of the job. Marketing is also a rather demanding force. AI helps us keep marketing without needing to use up so much of our energy we have nothing left for the fun part of the job, the content creation. In this way, AI helps us stay more balanced so we can keep delivering high-quality, researched, experienced, and practical herbal wisdom and information to you.

One promise we make with regard to our use of AI for marketing is that no social media AI-created content is ever published without a real human taking a good look at it to ensure it’s accurate and represents The Practical Herbalist’s values before it’s published.

AI is a terrific tool when it’s used with integrity. We promise to only use AI with integrity and to be clear with you when we are using AI.