The core rule

AI can help with the work. People make the decisions, check the facts, and take responsibility for the final piece.

Every published piece has a named editor. If AI helped with drafting or editing, that editor still owns the work.

What AI is allowed to do

  • Draft prose from facts our staff has already sourced and checked.
  • Summarize public records, court filings, datasets, and long documents, with a person checking the summary against the source.
  • Surface and cluster local stories, filings, and data that national outlets skip.
  • Suggest headlines, structure, and story angles.
  • Copyedit, tighten prose, adjust tone.
  • Help translate dense policy or legal language into plain English, with the final version checked against the source.

What AI is not allowed to do

  • Generate a fact, name, quote, statistic, or date on its own.
  • Invent or paraphrase a quote. Quotes come from a recording, transcript, or document. Never from a model. An AI-generated quote is a fabrication.
  • Attribute anything to a named person unless our staff sourced it.
  • Characterize a living person’s motives, beliefs, or state of mind beyond what they’ve said on the record.
  • Write the interpretation on a hard-news story.
  • Serve as a source.

Stories AI does not draft

Some stories are handled by a human from scratch. AI is not used to draft any part of them:

  • Any piece involving a minor.
  • Any piece involving a crime victim or their family, named or identifiable.
  • Ongoing litigation where the piece describes allegations.
  • Any claim that could defame a private individual.
  • Any piece describing a named person’s health, criminal history, immigration status, or sexuality.

On these stories, AI may still help organize public background material. It does not draft the story.

Verification is human

Every fact in a published piece is checked against a real source by a person on our staff. Every quote is traced to a recording, transcript, or document we have reviewed. See our Editorial Policy for the full pre-publish checklist.

What we log

Significant AI assistance is logged internally with the piece it was used on, the task, and the person who used it.

We review those logs alongside corrections so we can see what is working and what needs to change.

Disclosure to readers

We do not label a piece “AI-assisted” every time software helps with copyediting. We do commit to the following:

  • If a piece was substantially drafted with AI assistance, we say so on the piece.
  • If AI helped with structural work — summarizing a long document, clustering filings, translating policy language — and that materially shaped the reporting, we say so.
  • If you want to know how AI was involved in a specific piece, email us. We’ll answer.

If we ever have to choose

If we ever have to choose between publishing faster and publishing accurately, we choose accuracy.