AI Policy

Last updated: June 22, 2026

At YESEO, we believe AI should empower journalists to use technology in a responsible way. Our AI policy reflects our commitment to transparency, data privacy, ethical use, and human-centered design. These are foundations upon which Ryan Restivo built YESEO as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow. This policy was developed through years of research analyzing over 60,000 AI-generated headlines, conversations with newsroom leaders, collaboration with the journalism community, and listening to our audience about how they feel about AI in journalism. This is a living document and will be updated as new contributions to the field are made.

The core of YESEO is 100% bona fide human written code, most written before YESEO launched in March 2023. The YESEO app is powered by Python, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. This website is powered by Next.js and React.

Over time, the website and the YESEO app have been co-developed by large language models as a coding assistant to deliver additional features and changes. A human must review every commit and pull request before it is deployed in YESEO or on this website.

Listening to Our Audience

Based on our review of the Trusting News AI Trust Kit and their findings that audiences prefer to know when AI is used in journalism, we have updated our approach to AI transparency. Their research shows that audiences are skeptical about AI use in news — and they want to understand not just whether AI was used, but why and how it was checked for accuracy. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, which Trusting News cites, less than a third (32%) of Americans say they trust AI. Our policy incorporates their four key recommendations: listen and engage audiences, commit to transparency, practice ethical use, and invest in community education about AI.

How Other Research Shapes Our Policy

Beyond Trusting News, three additional studies published in 2026 reveal how fundamentally AI assistance reshapes the writing process in ways most people don't notice:

A mixed-methods study of 1,291 AI co-writing sessions published in 2026 identified what they term reactive writing — a process where AI suggestions interrupt a writer's own ideation before they've fully formed their thoughts, prompting them to shift from generating ideas to evaluating the AI's suggestions instead. The researchers found that writers consistently felt "fully in control" of their writing even as AI suggestions shaped their output.

This finding directly reinforces YESEO's design principle: every suggestion must be human-controlled and human-approved, because the very act of engaging with data generated by large language models can shape thought patterns without awareness. Suggestions created by the YESEO app avoid freeform generation and instead anchor suggestions to structured SEO data and audience behavior — giving journalists concrete information to evaluate rather than open-ended text to accept or reject. Most of all, human oversight is essential for this process because people must act on the information to shape their own decisions on what to do with the information.

AI influence is most powerful when it operates below conscious awareness. This is why YESEO's approach prioritizes making that influence explicit and structured by anchoring suggestions and giving a user the job of deciding what works for them.

Our Core Principle: AI Informs, Humans Decide

AI as Assistance, Not Authorship

Our position is clear: AI should serve as a tool for journalists, not as a substitute for journalistic judgment. Our research comparing AI and human-written headlines has taught us that AI can generate structurally sound, attention-grabbing headlines — but it cannot understand editorial context, newsroom tone, or the nuances of a community it wasn't raised in.

YESEO provides headline suggestions based on SEO data, audience behavior, and pattern recognition. Every suggestion requires a journalist's manual approval. We do not auto-publish, we do not auto-generate stories, or make editorial decisions for our users. The reporter owns every word.

Why This Matters

Our analysis of over 60,000 AI-generated headlines revealed consistent limitations: AI tends to repeat familiar words and patterns and cannot exercise editorial discretion. These are not bugs — they are fundamental constraints of pattern-matching systems. That is why webuilt YESEO to work alongside reporters, in the same Slack workspace where they do their daily work, offering data to users but allowing them to makedata informed decisions.

Transparency and Honesty

We Will Not Say AI Wrote Something If It Did Not

At YESEO, we believe audiences deserve to know the role of AI in journalism. Research from Trusting News confirms that most people prefer to be told when AI is involved and want to understand the context behind its use.

Any content generated with YESEO's assistance is clearly a human-authored piece — a headline crafted by a reporter informed by data. We do not label, tag, or present any YESEO-assisted output as AI-generated because that is not what it is, and misrepresenting the authorship of content is, in our view, a form of deception.

Explaining Why and How

Trusting News found that audiences need more than a simple AI-use disclosure — they want to understand why AI was used and how humans checked it for accuracy. At YESEO:

  • Why: YESEO uses AI to provide data-driven headline suggestions based on SEO patterns and audience behavior. This helps reporters make informed decisions faster, but every suggestion requires manual journalist approval.
  • How: Every headline suggestion is manually reviewed and approved by a journalist before publication. No AI output is auto-published. Ryan Restivo reviews every commit and pull request that adds or modifies YESEO functionality, ensuring ongoing human control.

Open About Our Process

We seek to find every publication that has written about YESEO and compile it on the Press page. We believe that understanding how this tool is intended to be used, as well as what is said by Ryan Restivo, is an important foundation to building trust in using the service. We invite any questions journalists have and Ryan has trained people across the world to use this tool. We are happy to answer any questions because we want the journalism community to understand how our tool works and how it can help them.

Multi-Layered Transparency (Because In-Story Disclosure Isn't Enough)

Trusting News found that disclosure must go beyond in-story mentions. Trust is built when transparency appears at multiple levels. At YESEO, we practice transparency across four layers:

  • Product level: YESEO headlines are presented as "suggestions" to journalists, with clear language that they are data-informed, not AI-generated content.
  • Policy level: This page provides full detail on our AI policies and practices.
  • Internal use: When we use AI internally to develop YESEO or this website, we disclose how we use it in our policy.
  • Audience-facing: YESEO features are documented to users with clear explanations of how AI assists and where human judgment remains.

Data Privacy and Protection

Your Data Is Yours

We built YESEO specifically because newsrooms needed an SEO tool that did not require sending their work to third-party AI models. When you enter a story into YESEO, your data stays on our infrastructure and is encrypted in transit and at rest. We do not train on your data. No other workspace understands that your story exists when you put it into YESEO. We do not share your data with any third-party AI provider. We do not sell, rent, or exploit any user information and we never intend to.

Privacy by Design

All story text entered into YESEO has been encrypted within our databases and API endpoints. Our product was embraced by newsrooms specifically for this reason — the ability to enhance SEO without compromising editorial confidentiality or sending unpublished stories to external systems.

Ethical Use

Avoiding the Moral Gray Area of AI

We take seriously the questions raised in journalism ethics discussions about AI and media. Our approach is guided by these principles:

  • Audit the suggestions YESEO generates to ensure quality
  • Use data to inform editorial decisions
  • Never generate complete stories
  • Never fabricate sources or quotes
  • Always give human journalists the final say in their experience
  • Be transparent on how large language models are used

Our research confirms that AI is a powerful pattern-recognition tool, but it is not a substitute for editorial judgment. Ryan is consistent in presenting his finding and these reasonings to help journalists.

Google's AI Overviews and Zero-Click Search

Adapting Without Surrendering

As search continues to evolve, we have studied the challenges and opportunities these create for publishers. YESEO's approach includes:

  • Supporting publishers who need to adapt without compromising journalistic standards
  • Continuing to optimize for discovery across all platforms, including direct traffic and social
  • Ensuring headline suggestions work for both traditional SEO and AI-powered search results
  • Helping newsrooms build audience relationships that are not dependent on any single search engine

Accountability and Improvement

When AI Goes Wrong

We take seriously the responsibility of using technology for good. That is why we believe in these principles.

  • Regular human review of all AI-generated output to catch and correct errors
  • Continuous monitoring of AI behavior as models and algorithms evolve
  • Rapid response protocols when issues are identified, whether in our own systems or third-party AI tools used by newsrooms
  • Open communication with the journalism community about AI risks and mitigation strategies
  • Training newsroom teams on how to use AI tools effectively and safely

Supporting the Journalism Community

Data-Informed, Not Data-Driven

Our philosophy is data-informed, not data-driven. Data should inform and strengthen editorial decisions, not make them. The newsroom's mission, their community's needs, and their journalists' expertise must always be the primary drivers of coverage decisions.

This is the same principle that guided our 2024 Online Journalism Awards Excellence in AI Innovation finalist submission and our collaboration with The Oglethorpe Echo in the JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative. Our work demonstrated that AI tools are most effective when they fit inside existing newsroom workflows and empower reporters rather than replacing them.

Community Education

Investing in AI Literacy

Trusting News lists "investing in educating your community about AI" as one of their four core recommendations. We believe newsrooms and the audiences they serve need better AI literacy, and YESEO is committed to contributing to that effort by:

  • Publishing open research on how AI performs (and doesn't perform) in real editorial workflows. All stories about YESEO are accessible on our Press Page
  • Hosting training sessions for journalists worldwide on how to use AI tools effectively and responsibly.
  • Maintaining this public AI policy as a living document that evolves with the technology and with audience feedback.
  • Making YESEO's AI-assisted processes transparent and understandable to the journalists who use our tool every day.

AI for Internal Use at YESEO

Our Own Practices

A good example of our AI Policy is this page. This page was created using a local model that read every press release to create an "AI Policy". Then a human read and changed copy to make sure it reads and is consistent with the principles of why YESEO exists. All links were added by a human and paragraphs were changed to give it the style of the rest of the website, which is all human written. We apply these same standards internally:

  • All code is reviewed by a human before deployment
  • All copy is written by humans
  • We use AI to find product improvements, but we also talk to users to find out what is important
  • We do not automatically publish or auto-generate any public-facing content on our behalf
  • We continuously evaluate whether our AI use aligns with our stated principles

This Policy Will Evolve

AI technology will continue to evolve. The journalism landscape will change. Our policy will be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect these changes while maintaining our core belief: that AI is a powerful assistive tool when used ethically, transparently, and under human control.

Questions about this policy should be directed to us through ryan@yeseo.app or via our contact page.