These guidelines are meant to ensure The Baltimore Banner is empowering our staff and colleagues to improve and enhance their work, while ensuring the organization’s integrity and security remain intact.
With that in mind, our values will dictate our decision-making about the tools we choose to use.
We will:
As part of maintaining our values, we will emphasize fairness, accountability, transparency, human verification, privacy, security, service to our audience and a commitment to reducing bias.
We will actively work to eliminate bias in AI systems by auditing training data, diversifying inputs and ensuring balanced representation in the content we produce or recommend. Our goal is to support journalism that is inclusive, accurate and free from algorithmic prejudice.
All information generated by AI requires human verification. Everything we publish will live up to our standards of verification. Increasingly, it is important to be explicit about how we know facts are facts. This will be particularly important when using AI. But this also applies to other aspects of our organization.
Every decision made with the help of AI — whether in writing, editing or recommending stories — must be overseen by a member of our staff who will remain responsible for the outcome.
Our AI tools must be rigorously tested to perform reliably across real-world conditions, languages and formats. We prioritize accuracy and consistency.
Our relationship with our audience is rooted in trust and respect. To that end, as we utilize AI to customize content or develop products that alter the way content is delivered, we will protect our audience’s data in accordance with our newsroom’s privacy policies and in full compliance with data protection laws.
As technology advances and opportunities to customize content for users arise, we will be explicit about how your data is collected — in accordance with our organization’s privacy policy — and how it was used to personalize your experience.
Therefore, we will disclose any editorial content that has been created and distributed based on that personalization.
We are committed to using AI responsibly, ethically and with a deep respect for journalism’s role in society. We regularly assess the impact of our technology, and we will never use AI in ways that could manipulate, mislead or erode the public’s trust.
The environmental consequences of generative AI, particularly the increased use of electricity and water, have become an important part of the broader discussion about the technology’s ethical use. The Banner’s use of AI will not influence our news coverage of the energy and sustainability issues related to the technology, and we will continue to monitor all aspects of its environmental costs and impacts.
As we use AI in our journalism, we will document and describe the tools with specificity in our stories when warranted. When AI tools influence audience-facing content, we will tell the audience in ways that both disclose and educate them. We will work with editors, photographers and reporters to create disclosures that are precise in language without being onerous to our audience or staff. This may be a short paragraph, a tagline, a caption or an editor’s note.
These disclosures are paramount to maintaining trust with our subscribers and the public. They can also create opportunities to get audience feedback and educate our readers.
Our work in AI should be guided by what will be useful to our audience as we serve them. We have made a promise to our audience to provide them with information that increases trust and understanding. We believe that our use of AI will help us be more productive and deliver more high-quality journalism, which will benefit our readers.
With the seven previous principles as our foundation, we will embrace innovation and experimentation. We should strive to invest in training — internal or external — so every staff member is knowledgeable in generative AI tools.
Last updated: May 14, 2025
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