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Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how people work, and journalism is no exception. We believe readers deserve to know how The Daily Catch uses AI tools — and, just as importantly, how we do not. We will update this document regularly. (It was, by the way, written by humans).
The Daily Catch utilizes AI to assist its journalists across various tasks, from creating interview transcriptions to processing extensive data. The organization emphasizes that while AI tools are employed, every published article is authored, reviewed, and approved by human journalists and editors. Human oversight remains paramount for all reporting, editing, fact-checking, judgment, and publishing decisions. AI serves as an aid, not a replacement, for journalists. In fact, The Daily Catch has expanded its reporting staff and added a managing editor since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2023, doubling its team.
The Daily Catch incorporates AI bots as a research tool to address a multitude of factual and historical inquiries that arise throughout the reporting and editing process. Staff members frequently use AI to clarify legal procedures, condense government reports and court decisions, establish historical context, confirm AP Style guidelines, elucidate scientific and technical concepts, pinpoint authoritative sources, and answer background questions. This includes topics ranging from the history of the Linotype machine to interpreting environmental testing results or municipal law. These AI-powered inquiries bolster journalistic efficiency, but critically, every fact included in their reporting undergoes independent review and verification by a human editor prior to publication.
Reporters at The Daily Catch employ Otter AI for recording and transcribing interviews and public meetings. This technological assistance enables journalists to dedicate more time to actual reporting and less time to the manual transcription of recordings. Additionally, this tool facilitates rapid searching through transcriptions to efficiently locate pertinent quotes for inclusion in articles.
AI tools, including ChatGPT, are sometimes utilized by The Daily Catch to aid in the analysis of extensive public documents such. These documents include court decisions, financial filings, prospectuses, environmental studies, and government reports. For instance, AI has been instrumental in reviewing court decisions pertinent to significant development projects, such as Six Senses, and comprehensive financial filings, like the prospectus for Rhinebeck Bank’s recent offering. All information extracted and summarized by AI is thoroughly verified by human journalists before it is published.
Agendas for town, village, school board, and planning board meetings often come with hundreds of pages of supporting documents. AI can effectively scan these vast materials to pinpoint key issues, create concise summaries, and highlight potential inconsistencies between related documents.
The Daily Catch occasionally uses AI platforms like ChatGPT or Claude to execute complex calculations. Journalists can describe these calculations in natural language, and AI translates them into formulas to provide the necessary outputs, streamlining data analysis.
Editors sometimes leverage AI tools to generate suggestions for headlines. While AI provides initial ideas, the final headline is often a composite of several suggestions or is substantially revised and refined by human editorial staff.
For sections featuring shortened summaries of press releases, such as The Short Catch, AI may assist in condensing verbose, boilerplate content into concise summaries. These AI-generated summaries are invariably reviewed and edited by human staff before being published.
The Daily Catch adheres to AP style guidelines. Several AI engines are proficient in this style, making it a time-saving resource to consult AI for style queries rather than manually sifting through traditional style guides.
AI image-generation tools are sometimes used by The Daily Catch to create illustrative graphics, particularly for specific projects, anniversary features, explanatory articles, or historical retrospectives. The organization ensures that AI-generated images are never used in a manner that misrepresents actual events. When AI is employed to create an image, this is explicitly indicated with a credit line. For example, AI-generated images of piggy banks are sometimes used for budget stories that are difficult to visualize.
The Daily Catch utilizes tools such as Grammarly to suggest improvements for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style. Editors meticulously evaluate these suggestions, choosing to accept or reject them individually during the review process of stories.
The Daily Catch firmly restricts the use of AI in critical aspects of its journalistic operations. AI is strictly not permitted to directly publish stories to the website, nor is it relied upon to make editorial judgments about news coverage. Furthermore, AI-generated images are not used to falsely represent actual news events.
The Daily Catch does not employ AI-generated images as substitutes for authentic photographs of real people, events, places, or news. Their journalism is grounded in genuine photography and visual reporting. AI-generated images are only very rarely used for clearly illustrative purposes, such as in anniversary features, explanatory graphics, or other non-news content. When circumstances permit, the organization prefers to engage human artists for all illustrations. Any graphics created with AI tools are explicitly identified with a credit line to maintain transparency.
The Daily Catch is unwavering in its commitment to journalism that upholds accuracy, fairness, transparency, and accountability, recognizing these as fundamental human endeavors. While AI can augment efficiency, it cannot replicate human judgment, local expertise, skepticism, or the inherent responsibility of journalism. Every single story published by The Daily Catch remains solely the responsibility of human journalists and editors. This foundational principle is a steadfast promise to their readers and will not change. The policy was posted in June 2026.