How we use AI
We want you to know exactly where Talescout uses artificial intelligence, what it is never used for, and how you can always tell.
Three kinds of writing in your scroll
Three kinds of writing appear in your scroll, each labelled where you read it:
- Dramatised by Talescout (Historical · Talescout dramatisation):real people, real events, dramatised by AI from a named published record. The edition is named on the story's first page and its endpaper. Dialogue and inner life may be reconstructed; dates, events and every quoted phrase are held to the record.
- Talescout-written synthesis (Knowledge): an AI-written arrangement of named human documents — diaries, letters, official reports — with each source stated where it is used. Where the record is silent, the piece says so.
- True pages: short distillations drawn from a named non-fiction book by its real author, named on the card before you read.
Every path ends at a real book by a real author.
Book descriptions: source first, never invented
Book descriptions come from publisher-supplied catalogue text or public bibliographic sources such as Open Library and Google Books. We may clean formatting or shorten a long description for the sheet, but a missing description is not permission to make one up. When no source description is available, Talescout shows its recommendation reason with the book's known genre or era instead. That fallback is a positioning note, not a publisher blurb.
Genres, moods and recommendation reasons may be AI-assisted, but they stay grounded in the catalogue record and in the story or topic that led to the recommendation. Always confirm edition, price and availability with the retailer.
Ratings: named sources, shown separately
Ratings are displayed only when a source supplies both a real average and a reader count. Talescout currently supports Open Library and Google Books and names each source beside its own figure; it does not blend them into a made-up universal score. One available source appears alone, and no available source means no rating row.
Goodreads no longer offers a suitable public ratings API, and Amazon ratings are not licensed to us for display. We do not scrape either service, copy their numbers without permission, or fabricate a substitute. A future source will appear only through a licensed or otherwise permitted data feed.
Non-fiction and topic explainers
Our book summaries and “what’s actually true” topic pages are AI-drafted analysis and opinion, written under rules that require named sources, plain language about uncertainty, and a clear split between the mainstream view, credible contrarian reads and our own weighted take. They can be wrong; we’d rather be corrected fast than pretend otherwise. Nothing there is professional advice.
Personalisation
Talescout learns your apparent preferences from how you read and uses them to tailor your feed. That personalisation runs on our own systems against your anonymous profile — see the Privacy policy for what is collected and your controls.
What we do not use AI for
- No decisions about you with legal or similarly significant effects.
- No fake reviews, fake ratings or fake endorsements.
- No passing off AI writing as human-written, or fiction as fact.
How you can always tell
Talescout labels AI work where it is most useful: fiction is marked in the Scroll context band, full stories carry one quiet link after The End, and source-led True surfaces keep their named provenance trail. Linked books, authors and named sources are real.
Affiliate disclosure follows the purchase choice instead: each retailer link that actually carries Talescout attribution is marked “Paid link”; untagged choices are not. Read the full Affiliate disclosure.
EU AI Act Article 50
Article 50 of the EU AI Act contains transparency rules for certain AI-generated or manipulated content. Talescout treats that transparency as a product rule, not a footer formality: the disclosure is in plain language on the surface itself, is visually distinguishable without interrupting the reading, and leads to this durable explanation. Colour never stands in for provenance, and the detail is not hidden only in terms and conditions.
The precise legal duty can depend on the content and on the role of the organisation providing or deploying an AI system. Our consistent floor is simpler: generated fiction is labelled, AI-drafted non-fiction and synthesis are labelled, real books and authors are identified plainly, and sourced facts remain traceable to their named sources. Questions: privacy@talescout.app.