How this site is written.

Ancient Epidemics is written by Ashley Morgan. This page explains, plainly, what that means in practice — including where AI tools are used, and where they are not.

We write the articles ourselves

Every article on this site starts as our own writing: our own reading, our own research, our own arguments and our own conclusions. Where a piece draws on academic papers, museum visits, primary sources or other researchers’ work, that’s stated in the text and listed in the References section at the end of the article. The opinions, the framing and the throughline of an article are ours, not an AI’s.

Where we use AI

We use AI tools for three things:

• Formatting. Turning a written draft into web-ready copy — headings, paragraph structure, internal links to other articles on this site and to related work on our other sites, and the Key Takeaways and Q&A sections that accompany each piece.
• Fact-checking. Checking specific claims, dates, names and figures in a draft against real, citable sources before publication, and flagging anything that can’t be verified.
• Images. Almost all of the illustrations on this site depict people, objects and places from long before photography existed, so we use AI image generation for them. Where a photograph is genuinely ours — taken by us, of something real — it’s captioned as a photograph, not AI-generated.

What AI does not do

AI does not decide what an article argues, does not write our opinions for us, and is not treated as a source of historical fact in its own right. Every specific claim in an article is checked against real, named, linked sources — not asserted because an AI tool said so.

Why we’re telling you this

Because it’s the kind of thing a reader has a right to know, and because a site about evidence and how we know what we know should be straightforward about its own methods.