About Us
The world's most read coffee and espresso resource
The world of technology is in a constant state of flux, and the latest sea change is the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence. It is a powerful, fascinating, and sometimes concerning evolution in how information is created and processed. At CoffeeGeek, we have spent over two decades building a community based on trust, authenticity, and a genuine passion for all things coffee. We believe it is crucial to be completely transparent with you, our reader, about how we do, and more importantly, how we do not, use AI on this website.
Our primary tool is Gemini Pro, the Google AI product. We’ve specifically set up “Gems”, which is Gemini’s way of creating custom AI engines, to suit our usage scenarios on CoffeeGeek. Some of our writers use professional-level access to ChatGPT.
Our guiding principle is simple: AI is a tool, not a creator. The voice, opinions, and stories you read on CoffeeGeek are, and will remain, human. Coffee is an inherently human experience, from the farmer who cultivates the bean to the barista who perfects the shot to the enthusiast who savours the cup. We are committed to ensuring that the content celebrating this experience remains a product of human hands and minds.
To be perfectly clear, our core content is off-limits for AI generation. We want to draw a firm line so that you always know what you are reading on CoffeeGeek is authentic and human-driven.
Specifically, we do not use AI to create new content of any kind. Our articles, reviews, opinion pieces, and guides are conceived, researched, and written by our team of writers. We do not use AI to write journalistic content based on press releases or other promotional materials. Furthermore, we do not use AI to create any motion video content for the website. With a few very specific exceptions that we will detail below, we also do not use AI to create photographs or visual graphics.
While we don’t use AI to write for us, we do employ it in a few specific, supervised ways to enhance our workflow, maintain consistency, and assist our writers. Think of it less as an author and more as a highly specialized assistant who helps with grammar, organization, and research, always under the watchful eye of our editorial staff.
Over the 25 years this website has been online, we have developed a comprehensive CoffeeGeek Style Guide. It is a detailed document that covers everything from our approach to grammar and spelling to how we use honorifics and people’s names. Recently, we have integrated this entire style guide into a custom ‘Gem’ within the Gemini AI platform. This essentially teaches the AI our specific house style, which it keeps in its memory.
This is our main use of AI: as a final check for grammatical correctness, spelling, and style consistency. For our editors, the process is now very straightforward. We take a finished article, provide it to the AI, and simply ask it to “apply the CoffeeGeek Style Guide.” This is similar to asking an AI to check a document against the AP Stylebook or the New York Times’ writing style, only it is using our own unique guide that we’ve developed and honed over two decades. The AI is given firm instructions not to change any substance, writer-style, background details, or facts within the articles it checks. Most importantly, every single edit suggested by the AI is then reviewed and approved by one of our editors before publication. The final word always belongs to a person.
We sometimes use AI, particularly advanced research modules including Gemini’s “Deep Research” mode, to assist in gathering information. However, we treat any information provided by an AI with a healthy dose of skepticism. Any data, historical claim, or technical fact sourced through AI is subject to rigorous verification using reliable third-party sources before it is ever considered for inclusion in our content.
For our formal review formats, such as our First Look Snapshots and Full Reviews, we use AI to generate structured outlines for our writers. Based on our detailed templates and guidelines, the AI produces a dynamic template for the writer to follow, ensuring all the necessary criteria are covered consistently from one review to the next. It is important to note that the AI provides only the framework; it does not create or supply any of the actual written content that fills it.
This is an area we have approached with particular caution. We use AI to create images and pseudo-photographs only in very limited circumstances, and always for specific, ethical reasons.
A primary example involves our stance on certain corporations. We do not support Nestlé and actively boycott the brand. If we need to write a feature on Nespresso capsules to inform our readers, we face a dilemma. To avoid purchasing dozens of capsules and thereby giving Nestlé our money, we would use AI to generate the hero images for that article. This allows us to cover a topic relevant to the coffee world without compromising our ethical position.
We are also currently running a trial that allows some of our writers to use AI for imagery development. This is a test period, specifically for talented writers who are not professional-level photographers and struggle to produce high-quality images for their articles. CoffeeGeek is a very independent website with a modest income, and we simply cannot afford to hire professional photographers for every blog post, which can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. This limited use of AI imagery allows us to feature more voices and stories from our writing team that might otherwise go unpublished.
Our relationship with our readers is our most valuable asset. This policy is our promise to you that CoffeeGeek will remain a source of authentic, human-created content. We will continue to explore AI as a tool that can help us work better and more efficiently behind the scenes, but we will never let it replace the human element that is the heart and soul of this website. As this technology evolves, so will our policies, and we promise to always keep you informed.