Some of our briefs are drafted by software. This page explains which ones, how they are made, and what we refuse to let it write.
If you arrived here from the line at the bottom of a brief, this is how that brief was written.
The New England Signal uses AI to write short news briefs from press releases issued by prosecutors and police departments. The system reads the agency’s public announcement and summarises it. The brief runs under the byline “Signal Staff” and publishes automatically — no editor reads it before it goes live, and every one of them carries a line saying so.
A brief like that is a summary of a single public document and nothing more. It attributes what it reports to the agency that issued it, and where someone has been charged rather than convicted, it says so. There are whole categories of story the desk will not touch at all — among them cases involving minors, sexual offences, suicides, active manhunts, police shootings and immigration enforcement — because those need a reporter rather than a summariser. We would rather be absent from a story than automate it badly.
Why we do it this way
We use AI so that journalists can spend their hours on the stories that cannot be written with AI. A press release restated is a public document that already exists, written by the government and released to everyone; it is not work worth a reporter’s morning. The stories that matter rarely arrive that way. They need someone with a notebook, a phone, and the standing to ask an uncomfortable question twice. That is where we want our people, and it is a fair thing to hold us to.
Corrections
If a brief is wrong, tell us and we will correct it on the page. Write to nesignal@audience-builders.com and say which brief and what is wrong with it. A machine drafted it; the responsibility for it is entirely ours.