How Brushline Started and What We Hold Ourselves To

Brushline started in Leeds in 2023, after its founding editor spent a year reading online takes on art and artificial intelligence that repeated the same three claims without checking any of them. Most pieces treated "AI art" as one single thing, used "creativity" and "originality" as if they meant the same thing, and rarely named who made the claim they were reporting. Brushline was set up to do the opposite: define each term before using it, name every source, and have a second editor check the draft against those sources before it goes live.

The team works out of a small office on Kirkstall Road and runs its editorial process the way a technical manual gets written. Every article lists the practising artists, art historians or software documentation it draws on. A shared glossary fixes how terms such as "AI-generated," "AI-assisted" and "human-made" are used across the site, so a reader never has to guess which one a given article means. Before publication, a second editor checks the draft against the glossary and against the sources cited, and flags any claim that cannot be traced back to one.

Brushline is funded by reader subscriptions and by a small number of display ads kept separate from editorial content, which never influence which topics get covered or how they are written. Writers keep their byline and their disagreements: two contributors can publish opposing views on the same question, and both stay on the site. When a published claim turns out to be wrong or outdated, it goes into a public correction log rather than being quietly edited away.