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The Lord of the Rings™, The Hobbit™, and the names of the characters, items, events, and places therein are trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises LLC. All other trademarks, logos, and copyrighted materials - including film, television, and other third-party properties - are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification and commentary only.

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Use of AI

Last updated July 17, 2026

We believe you should know how the things you use are made. This page explains, plainly, where artificial intelligence was and was not part of building the Official Lord of the Rings Fan Club.

The artwork is human

Every illustration, graphic, and piece of visual art on this site was made by human artists and creators. No artwork on this site was generated with AI. The hand-drawn keepsakes, the welcome illustrations, the emblems on your Mathoms: people made those, and we commissioned or licensed them the ordinary way. We think a club built on the work of one extraordinary author, his illustrators, and generations of fan artists owes that standard to its members.

One small clarification so nothing misleads: you will also see ordinary emoji around the club, in posts, reactions, and buttons. Those are the standard symbols your own device provides, the same ones in your text messages. We did not draw them, and neither did an AI.

How we used AI to build the site

The club was designed and built by a small team working side by side with AI tools for software engineering. In practice that means AI helped us write, review, and test the site's code, working under human direction with every change reviewed and decided by people. The ideas, the features, the words you read, and the judgment calls are ours; AI helped us build them faster and more carefully than a small team otherwise could.

Where AI runs inside the club

A few club features use AI while you use the site, always in a supporting role:

  • Keeping rooms kind. Posts in shared spaces pass through an automated tone check before or shortly after they appear. It nudges rather than punishes: if screening declines a post, you'll see the reason and can revise and resubmit, or use the "Ask for a second look" option to have a person review the decision - our reply arrives in your Messages. Anything the check holds for review is decided by a human steward, and actions against accounts, such as suspensions, are always decided by people.
  • Helping the club team write. The team sometimes uses AI to draft or proofread club copy, game riddles, and announcements. A person reviews and approves everything before it reaches you.
  • Checking quest photos. Some challenges ask for a photo or screenshot as proof. When you submit one, we may send the image to Anthropic, our AI provider, solely to check that it shows the challenge task - nothing else. A passing check can complete your quest on the spot; anything unclear goes to a human reviewer instead. Proof images are deleted once a decision is made, and Anthropic does not use them to train its models.

We do not use AI to make decisions about your account or your membership, and we do not sell or share your content to train AI models.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you spot something that seems out of step with this statement, we want to hear about it. Write to us through Messages in the club and a person will reply.