Our newsroom uses AI tools to help research stories. People remain responsible for everything we publish, and every article that AI helped with says so.
What AI helps with
- Finding public sources on a topic and keeping track of where each fact came from.
- Summarising long documents, such as spec sheets, filings and announcements.
- Suggesting a structure or a first draft for a writer to rewrite and an editor to check.
- Checking a draft's facts against its cited sources, using a different AI model from the one that helped write it.
- Drawing charts from figures we have verified.
What AI never does
- Publish anything. Only an editor can publish, and every article is reviewed and approved by a named editor first.
- Decide a review score or verdict. Those are always the reviewer's own.
- Invent quotes, facts or sources. Every fact in an article must trace to a source we link to.
- Fake photographs of real products, vehicles, people or events.
How we label it
- Articles that AI helped research or draft carry a "How this story was made" note at the end, saying what it did.
- AI-generated images are used only as illustrations, are labelled "AI-generated illustration" on the image, and carry that information in the image's metadata.
- Charts show the source of their figures.
Respecting other publishers
- Our research crawler, TheTechShotsBot, follows robots.txt and text-and-data-mining opt-outs, never reads paywalled content and limits how often it visits a site.
- We check drafts for similarity to their sources and rewrite anything too close. We do not republish other outlets' work.
- Copies of page text gathered for research are deleted after a short retention period; we keep short extracts and the link to the source.
Questions
If you think we got something wrong, tell us through the contact page or see our corrections policy.