FAQs

Q: How frequently does Waypoints publish stories?

A: Waypoints publishes every other Friday. We’d rather publish less and publish well. Our stories are long-form, deeply reported and built from weeks of pre-reporting and fieldwork. The pace is deliberate and so is the work.

Q: How do you use AI?

A: AI is a useful tool. Anyone who can’t acknowledge that is living in the past. But usefulness doesn’t demand dominance, it doesn’t mean it must touch everything we do and make.

I use AI. I use it everyday. I use it to help research and pre-report stories, to digest dense documents, to identify experts I might speak with, and to transcribe the interviews with those I do. I use it to sequence trip itineraries, to project and track expenses. I even speak to it, talking through potential stories or voicing worries about an upcoming trip. In these capacities it works astoundingly well. It is an incredibly capable assistant, helping to arrange the nuts and bolts of this work, but these outputs are starting points, work to be checked and double-checked.

I do not use AI for creation. Writing is the process of thinking. Editing, the expression of taste. Machine’s have none of their own, and so I do not use AI for writing or editing or any of the actual creative process needed to make these stories.

This publication is about connection and the imperfections of our lives. It is about connecting with you, with the wider world and the movement shaping it, and with the people at the center of that change. Artificial intelligence has no place in that.

Q: Are these photos real? Are you using AI to edit them?

A: Documenting the world through photography has been a large part of my life, and it feels strange to have to define what a photograph now is, to feel compelled to define what kind of images I am presenting here.

These photographs are taken and edited in a way that someone from 1900 or 2019 would understand. Light hit a sensor, recorded what was present, and that data was edited for aesthetic effect. Nothing was erased. Nothing was added. Everything you see in these photographs actually happened.

I very occasionally use editing tools that employ probability and algorithms to detect lines and borders in an image, and in that way an artificial intelligence is at work. But I do not add anything that was not present, or remove anything that was. I do not use generative fill or AI-powered denoising, processes that fill small sections of a photograph with a computer program’s guess of what should be there.

Have a question?

Get in touch with Mackenzie at Mackenzie@Waypoints.Media, the broader team at Team@Waypoints.Media or message us here -