Artificial Intelligence Tools
Chapter 2: Editorial Best Practices
AI tools may assist research—summarizing long spec PDFs, drafting outline structures, generating FAQ variants, or catching grammar issues—but humans accountable to Option Cutter must verify every material claim before publish.
We do not publish AI-generated “hands-on” impressions for products no reviewer wore, installed, or measured—that limit pairs with our plagiarism policy. We do not fabricate owner quotes, star distributions, or benchmark tables with models that hallucinate numbers.
When AI substantially shapes a section, editors should be able to explain what was verified: firmware version, retail SKU, price at a named retailer, or sensor behavior observed on wrist or in home lab.
Automated translation or localization must preserve safety warnings and regulatory nuance; health-adjacent wearables copy is re-checked by a fluent editor.
AI may not scrape competitor sites into our CMS bypassing copyright or terms of service. Training on stolen review text is not our workflow.
Disclosure to readers about AI use is evolving; when process affects trust—e.g., synthetic images—we say so in the article and follow image integrity rules. Process notes belong in methodology, not as a substitute for testing.
Prompt libraries and automated spec importers live in internal docs with version notes so editors know which pipeline produced a draft and what human steps still apply before a Top Picks badge ships.
Category editors maintain a short list of approved AI vendors and prohibited uses; experimenting with a new model on live YMYL wearables copy requires leadership sign-off and extra fact-check. Readers asking how we use AI should get a plain answer in methodology when it mattered to the piece; secrecy breeds suspicion more than thoughtful automation.
Approved AI workflows live in internal docs with version numbers so editors know which importer or summarizer touched a draft. New models on YMYL categories—sleep, heart rate, medical-adjacent wearables—need leadership sign-off and redundant human verification before publish. Document decisions in editor notes or the CMS so future updates honor the same standard.
Spec importers must not bypass paywalls or terms of service. Pulling competitor review text into WordPress is forbidden regardless of which bot performed the scrape. AI speed does not relax copyright or plagiarism rules we enforce on every byline. Document decisions in editor notes or the CMS so future updates honor the same standard.
Synthetic FAQ variants still need one human owner who can answer reader follow-ups with test notes. If you cannot defend a sentence in email, it should not ship because a model sounded confident on a spec we never measured. Document decisions in editor notes or the CMS so future updates honor the same standard.
Reader questions about AI belong in methodology when process materially affected the piece—synthetic b-roll, generated summaries of a 200-page manual, automated translation. Secrecy fuels suspicion; thoughtful transparency supports trust without turning every article into a tech essay. Document decisions in editor notes or the CMS so future updates honor the same standard.