How we use machine assistance

Readers deserve to know where automated tools touch our journalism. This page states the policy; a human editor is accountable for everything we publish.

Bylines

Articles appear under the named bylines of our masthead. These are house bylines: named editorial voices of the publication, produced with machine assistance under human editorial oversight, not real individual people. A human editor is accountable for everything we publish, and errors are corrected openly whether a human or a machine drafted the copy.

Where machine assistance may be used

• Research support: searching public records, documents, and archives.
• Transcription of interviews and public meetings.
• Drafting aid: organizing notes, checking style consistency.
• Data analysis of public datasets, with methods a human can reproduce.

Where it may not be used

• No fabricated quotations, sources, people, events, or data. Anything a tool produces must be verified against a real source before publication.
• No synthetic imagery presented as photography. Every photograph on this site is a real photograph of the actual subject.
• No published story goes out without human review by an editor who takes responsibility for it.

Disclosure

When machine assistance materially shapes a piece, we say so on the page. Routine assistance (transcription, spell-checking) is not separately disclosed.