AI-assistance disclosure
Where AI helps—and where it stops
AI can help organize reporting work, but it does not become an anonymous author, erase source obligations, or absorb editorial responsibility.
Current publishing posture
Human review is the default
Auto-publish is off. Every draft stops in the editorial review queue for a human decision before publication.
Human review always wins
- Why-it-matters analysis, community pulse, controversy explainers, and other formats configured as human-only
- Rumor-tier, embargoed, leaked, or datamined source material
- Sensitive topics, including tragedy-adjacent coverage, legal disputes, and health or financial claims
- Any draft that is borderline or fails a required quality or risk gate
What AI may assist with
- Scoring approved source items for niche relevance.
- Clustering related coverage and detecting possible duplicates.
- Building a structured fact brief with claim-level source attribution, uncertainty, a timeline, and open questions.
- Drafting original analysis from that fact brief.
- Checking citation coverage, source fidelity, similarity, rumor framing, and information gain before an editor sees the work.
What AI does not receive
The drafting step does not receive raw source prose. It works from the structured fact brief, apart from brief excerpts or quotations permitted by editorial policy. Subscriber data, editor credentials, and other personal information are not sent into the AI pipeline.
Controls before publication
Every draft must pass deterministic and model-assisted gates covering citations, fidelity, similarity, rumor labels, provenance, information gain, publication rate, and risk. A failed draft may be revised once; unresolved failures stop in the queue with reasons. Human approval never waives a failed mandatory gate.
Accountability and disclosure updates
A named editor—not a model—owns publication decisions and corrections. The owner must configure that identity before activation. If the runtime auto-publish switch changes, this page must be rendered from the same setting and active-format configuration so its status and eligible list change with it.