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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 August 26, 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 fan club of The Lord of the Rings.

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 (the Common Room, fellowship Campfires) pass through an automated tone check before or shortly after they appear. It nudges rather than punishes, and a human steward reviews anything it holds. Final moderation decisions are made by people.

  • Translating the club. When your language setting (or your browser's language) isn't English, member-written content you READ - Common Room posts and replies, fellowship messages, announcements, alerts, and messages with the club team - may be translated for you by an AI model. Turning translation off in your Preferences stops this everywhere. Translations are cached so the same text isn't processed twice.

  • Screening photos. A photo you submit (for example a challenge proof or a First Steps picture) is screened automatically before a person reviews it, to catch unsafe or off-topic images early. A human makes the final call.

  • Protecting your privacy as you write. Some forms (such as First Steps) check your draft as you go and warn you if it looks like it contains personal details - an email address, a phone number, someone's full name - before it would ever be published. The warning is advice; you decide.

  • Helping stewards read submissions. Member submissions that stewards review (riddles, kind words, lore, bug reports, support messages) may be shown to the reviewing steward in their own language via the same translation feature.

  • Checking lore before it is published. When you offer a piece of lore for the Lore of the Day, an AI reads your fact and your source hint, checks them against the club's own copy of the books, and, when the books are silent, searches official publisher and estate pages for support. It drafts what could be posted, together with its reasoning and the evidence it found, for a steward to judge; nothing is published without a person's approval. The AI's notes and evidence are kept with your submission while it is held for review, and leave with it if you ask for your participation data to be erased.

  • 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.

All of the above runs on Anthropic's Claude models under our agreement with Anthropic; the content processed for these features is not used to train AI 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.