The Viking Herald AI Policy

It will have escaped no one’s attention that Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a bit of a big thing lately. As you may have noticed, it is all over the internet, social media, our phones, basically everywhere.

You may even have seen it on The Viking Herald website – for a time, we used the AI image creation platform MidJourney to create (admittedly quite pleasing) pictures of Viking Age people and events.

It has, however, quickly become clear that there are significant problems with using AI in many fields, including – or especially – journalism.

In simple terms, if you are reading an article, you don’t want to find yourself questioning every line or image – is this from a human, or a chatbot?

Instead, it is much better to know that articles have been written by a real person and that the images are genuine, not fabrications. After all, without some level of trust journalism and the news begin to feel rather meaningless.

If we have a mission at The Viking Herald, it is to provide our readers with a reliable source of Viking Age news and to connect with other people who share our passion (obsession) for all things Viking. For this reason, it makes absolutely no sense for us to write anything with AI.

We do have to admit that there might be some rationale to using AI to create images. There are no contemporary paintings and very few depictions of any kind of even well-known figures from the Viking Age like Harald Fairhair, Ragnar Lothbrok or Freydís Eiríksdóttir. In fact, at least one of those three figures may never have existed at all. We also know from experience that AI-made glossy representations of a rugged Viking chieftain or a saucy Norse shieldmaiden tend to play pretty well on social media.

But again, we have decided that ultimately this will not work, because we want you to be able to trust everything you see on The Viking Herald.

With that in mind, here is our statement on AI:

We believe in human intelligence, human art, human writing and human interaction. And we also believe that the foundation of any website or news portal must be built on trust.

So this is our guarantee:

Every single word on this website is written by a human, and every newly published image is either a piece of human art or a photo taken by a human of real stuff.

(That doesn't mean that we won't ask a chatbot to help us solve some technical issue from time to time, or something similar. Generally, it is good to embrace new technology, we just believe in setting a few boundaries first.)

A further note

As humans, writing, editing and publishing articles naturally remains an incredibly time-consuming pastime. Unfortunately, we now have to compete – in internet searches, on social media – with people using AI to create an almost infinite stream of content about everything Viking-themed you could possibly imagine.

For this reason, we are more reliant on the contributions of our readers than ever. And so we inevitably have to ask for your help.

If you would like to support independent, human-centered journalism and reporting of the Viking Age, please consider joining us on Patreon.

And, if you have any questions or concerns about AI use or anything else on our website, please write to us at hello@thevikingherald.com.

Jonathan Bennett and The Viking Herald Team