How we use AI

Our principle: AI assists, people decide

Fargo INC! has spent eleven years earning trust with one promise: no opinions, no politics, all business. Artificial intelligence doesn't change that. We use AI as a tool to make our journalism easier to navigate — never as a replacement for reporting, editing, or human judgment.

A person is always accountable for what we publish.

Where you'll see AI on this site

AI Overview: some articles include a short, clearly-labeled summary generated from that article's own text, so you can decide quickly whether to read in full. The reported article is always the source of truth.

Discovery: we may use AI to power search and to help surface related stories.

Anywhere we use AI in a way you'd want to know about, we label it.

The Beat: AI-assisted curation

On The Beat, we use AI to gather publicly available local business items, remove duplicates, and propose what may be relevant to Fargo-Moorhead. A Fargo INC! editor reviews items before they appear, and every item links to its original source.

We collect only from public sources and aim to respect each source's terms and technical signals — we don't bypass paywalls or logins to take protected content. Any “why this matters” notes or summaries are machine-generated aids, never a substitute for the linked source, and may contain errors.

What AI does not do here

It does not write our journalism and pass it off as reported work, and it does not invent quotes, facts, or sources.

It does not generate AI “Overviews” on sponsored or partner content — we won't have a machine vouch for paid material.

It does not make editorial decisions, and it never introduces opinion or political slant. That's the whole point of our brand.

Accuracy & human oversight

AI-assisted summaries are derived from already-published, human-reported stories and are monitored by our team. If you ever spot an error in an AI Overview, tell us and we'll fix it.

Your data & AI

We do not sell your reading activity to train third-party AI models. AI features here work on article content, not on personal profiles of you.

Original work

Our photography and reporting are created by people. We don't pass off AI-generated images or text as original journalism.

This will evolve

AI is changing fast, and so will the ways it can responsibly help a local newsroom. We'll keep this page current as our practices change — and we'll keep the principle the same: AI serves the reader and the truth, never the other way around.