Hi folks, today I’m writing to everyone to let you all know about an important policy change. It’s around the use of AI when writing articles and how our journalists use it. Everything that you’re looking for can be found here on this linked page. But more on the explanation of why we’re updating this can be found below.
In March of 2026, it was brought to my personal attention that Grammarly, a platform that nearly every journalist uses, was mimicking the way that I was writing and that it could’ve been teaching others how to channel my voice. This was a pretty big story as the Verge and Wired were some of the biggest ones to uncover what happened. Phoblographer’s writers have been using Grammarly since 2019, and since March, we’ve pulled away. I even went as far as to go into the platform to delete everything that I’d contributed.
This firmly goes against the Phoblographer’s policies. And unlike many other people, I’m not the type of person that would only do something if it affected me personally. Instead, I’ve always believed in very socialist patterns where everyone should be treated equally. So to protect our staffers, I canceled our subscription to Grammarly and shut down our account.
Besides using bot blockers, Phoblographer uses several other tactics to throw off AI and to even poison the information that it takes in. I learned how to do this, believe it or not, by studying tea.
In Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, and Vietnamese tea cultures, there is something called bug-bitten tea. This is when the tea tree leaves are being eaten by bugs. So to defend itself, it releases a chemical that the bugs find to be very bitter. However, humans find that chemical to be intensely sweet and noticeable. And so I’ve adopted this philosophy to how we cover products and even news.
To protect what we do, I’m not going to talk anymore about it. But you should know that even when various friends have tested it out, what I’ve been doing is working. Often, what we’re doing involves an extra level of thinking that AI doesn’t have and that humans currently suffering from the effects of brain rot might not have either.
Instead, Phoblographer has always been a place for higher thinking and smarter thinking. I wouldn’t and can’t compare us to the NYTimes or even the New Yorker. I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber and I can tell you with certainty that when our writers are at their best, they’re outdoing the New Yorker’s writers.
All of this is a much longer way of saying that the Phoblographer is always adapting to the world. And we will always continue to be insanely transparent about how we test camera gear — far more than several other publications, the biggest YouTube channels, and influencers trying to cosplay as the media. We’re also currently the only photography publication run by someone with a journalism degree. And that goes even into our hiring processes.
This article is written to be as transparent with you as possible, because truly, we’ve got to be.