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 public agencies — prosecutors, police departments and other state and federal offices — by members of Congress, and by political parties. The system reads the public announcement and summarises it. The brief runs under the byline “Signal Bot” 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, office or party that issued it, and where someone has been charged rather than convicted, it says so. When the release comes from a political party or a member of Congress, their claims, criticisms and characterizations — including the credit they take for themselves — are attributed to them and never stated as fact in our voice. Sensitive stories get extra care, and some are better left to a reporter than to a summariser.

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 a government agency, an elected official or a political party 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 [email protected] and say which brief and what is wrong with it. A machine drafted it; the responsibility for it is entirely ours.