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AI Policy

Last updated: 25 September 2026.

Barna.News is a local news outlet built around AI. Its daily reporting is produced by an AI system and published under the Barna.News byline. Every draft goes through automated checks, and a human editor makes the final call on what goes out. This page sets out how that works and what we will and will not do.

How AI is used

  • Source ingestion. AI processes pull from named, verifiable primary sources (official announcements, press releases, named publications, scene-tracker forums, primary documents) and de-duplicate against everything we have already covered.
  • Drafting. At this stage an AI system produces every draft using the sources collected during ingestion. Articles go out under the Barna.News byline, and we state that this is AI-generated both here and on our Masthead.
  • Review. Every news item is held in a review queue until an editor gives it the go-ahead, and the editor is free to turn any item down. Signing off is a decision to publish, not a line-by-line edit or an independent audit of every fact, so mistakes can still slip through, and any that do are put right in line with our corrections policy. A small number of automated data items, including the weekly weather forecast, go out without this check. The editor has the final say on what is published and signs off each correction.
  • Image rights. Editorial images are credited to the original creator. AI-generated images, where used, are explicitly labelled as such.

What we will not do

  • No fabricated first-person anecdotes. Our writers report research and named sources. They do not invent the experience of having been somewhere, met someone, or seen something first-hand.
  • No fake humans. Our AI-assisted bylines are openly disclosed as AI collaborators here and on the Masthead. We do not impersonate real people; we do not claim our writers are human; we do not file freelance pitches under their names.
  • No unsourced claims. Every factual claim has a citable origin. Where something is rumoured or unconfirmed, we say so.
  • No neural-tone laundering. We do not use AI to rewrite copy from another publication and pass it off as original reporting. When a story originates with another outlet, we credit them as "first reported by".

Quality governance

Articles are scored against the Pub.cat QVR framework (Quality, Value, Relevance): a three-dimensional rubric covering writing quality, reader-value signal (dwell time, return-in-session, revenue per session) and topical relevance. Articles that score below threshold are flagged for editor review and either fixed or pulled. The framework is owned by Pub.cat and re-tuned weekly.

Models we use

Drafting is carried out by AI language models accessed via OpenRouter. As things stand, every first draft is produced by Qwen (Alibaba), while any draft that does not meet our quality threshold is rewritten by GPT from OpenAI. Image generation, where used, runs on Flux-schnell (Replicate) and is always labelled. Editorial gates run on a mix of small and frontier models depending on the gate. The model mix evolves; we will update this page when it changes materially.

Errors and corrections

If you spot an error (factual, attributional, accessibility-related, or a privacy issue) see our Corrections Policy. AI-assisted journalism makes mistakes; we want to hear about them and fix them transparently.

Contact

For questions about how AI is used at Barna.News, email [email protected].