Editorial standards

These standards apply to everything AI Affairs publishes, including opinion columns, newsletters and social posts. They are written down so readers can hold us to them.

Sourcing and verification

We prefer documents to conversations and named sources to anonymous ones. A number reaches print only when we can attribute it to a filing, a contract, a published dataset or a person who will stand behind it. Where a figure comes from a company that benefits from it, we say so in the sentence that carries the figure.

Anonymity is granted when a source faces a real professional risk and the information cannot be obtained another way. In those cases we describe the person’s position closely enough for readers to judge their vantage point. Claims from a single anonymous source are not published alone.

Corrections

Write to corrections@aiaffairs.com. We correct factual errors as soon as we confirm them. A corrected article carries an update timestamp and a note at the foot of the piece saying what changed and when. We do not delete published articles to resolve a complaint, and we do not quietly edit a claim out of existence.

Independence and funding

AI Affairs is funded by advertising and reader subscriptions. Advertising is sold through a third party network and is labelled wherever it appears. Advertisers have no sight of articles before publication and no influence over what we cover. We publish no sponsored articles.

Reporters disclose to editors any holding in a company they cover and do not trade in the securities of companies on their beat. Where a writer has a prior relationship with an organisation in a story, the article says so.

Opinion and labelling

Opinion columns argue a position and are labelled Opinion on the article page, in listings and in the structured data we publish for search engines and assistants. Reporters do not write opinion about their own beat in the same week they report on it.

Use of AI tools

We use machine translation, transcription and search tools in reporting, and a human checks their output against the source before anything is published. We do not publish generated text as reporting, and we do not publish generated or synthetically altered images as photographs. Where a tool materially shaped an article, for example a model used to classify a large document set, the method is described in the piece.

Right of reply

Any organisation or person facing a specific criticism is put to it before publication and given a reasonable window to respond, normally 24 hours and longer for complex matters. Declining to comment is reported as such. A substantive response received after publication is added to the article with its own timestamp.