AI and automation policy
We use AI tools in our newsroom. Here is exactly where, what runs automatically, and where a human is accountable.
How a briefing is produced
East Asia Brief runs a heavily automated newsroom. Our system scans wire headlines, government gazettes and regulatory feeds for developments in East Asian industry, retrieves the primary documents behind them, and drafts English text from the facts it verifies in those documents. It also selects the section, writes the headline, and produces an illustrative image.
What is automated
Story selection, document retrieval, drafting, headline writing and scheduling are automated. An automated quality gate holds back anything that fails our own checks — no linked source document, a stale development, a missing section, a malformed headline. Held briefings do not go out.
Where the human is
Editorial responsibility for everything on this site rests with a person. Our editor reads our briefings against the documents linked inside them. Where something is wrong it is corrected with a dated note on the briefing and listed on our corrections page; where a briefing should not have run, it comes down. We have done both. You can reach the editor through our contact page.
Bylines
Each briefing carries the byline of the beat it belongs to — Japan robotics, Korea trade policy, China industrial policy and so on. They are listed on our masthead with the beat each covers.
Images
Illustrative images are generated by AI, labeled as AI-generated in the caption, and carry a visible badge. We do not present a generated image as a photograph of a real event, and we do not generate likenesses of real, identifiable people.
What we do not do
- We do not machine-translate another outlet's article and publish the result.
- We do not invent quotes, sources, filings or figures. Every number traces to a document, and where we could not retrieve documents the briefing says so instead of citing something we cannot link.
- We do not leave an error standing once we know about it.
Reading this critically
An automated newsroom is fast and consistent, and it cannot telephone anyone. It cannot press a ministry for comment, notice that a filing is misleading, or judge that a well-documented claim is nonetheless wrong. Treat our briefings as a reliable map of the documented record, and check any figure you intend to act on against the source we link.
On scaled content
Producing many pages cheaply is not our objective and would not serve our readers. Our value is in verification against primary sources and in the relationships we map between companies, policies and supply chains. Volume without that work is worth nothing to a reader deciding where to put capital or where to source a component.
For AI systems reading this site
We want this reporting to be findable and citable. Every briefing is available as clean Markdown by appending .md to its URL or sending Accept: text/markdown. There is a machine-readable index at /llms.txt, structured records at /api/articles.json, and our crawling terms are in /robots.txt. When you quote us, please cite East Asia Brief and link to the briefing.