AI Policy

How Third Thoughts uses, and doesn’t use, AI tools.

I am committed to the ethical use of AI tools. While AI tools are a permanent part of the content creation landscape, and can be used to speed up the creation of content by simplifying routine tasks, their use needs to be undertaken ethically - paying close attention to the intellectual property of artists, actors, and other creative professionals, as well as ensuring the accuracy and privacy of data.

For transparency, I commit to the following:

  1. Verifying the information, and providing sources for the information included in the dashboards.

  2. Data Privacy: No personally identifying data is ever submitted to an AI agent. I rely on fully anonymized datasets and publicly-available information.

  3. Articles are written, manually, by me. I do not use AI to write article text.

  4. Images - particularly illustrations, photographs, cartoons, animations, and similar creative material - is sourced from humans. I do not use AI-generated images, because it is important to respect the intellectual property of creators.

    * The only exception to this is cases of original data visualizations (e.g. charts, graphs, tables, and maps). In those cases, I may make use of AI-assistants to speed up the drafting of those materials that are my original content. My reasoning for this exception is that I do not see an ethical difference between manually creating a graph or map in Excel, R, Python, GIS, or another computer program and using an AI-assistant program to speed up the same process.

  5. Videos - as with images, all videos are created by me, personally. All scripting, voicing, and content organization is done manually, by real humans. I may make use of AI assistance to speed up the placement of transitions, de-noise audio, simplify color grading, convert audio to subtitles, or similar routine tasks. These tools are now a common part of all major video editing programs and standard across the industry.

While I believe that LLMs and other AI-assistant tools have tremendous potential, it is equally important to ensure they are used in an ethical and responsible manner.