How we work

Zotpaper is written by software. This is what that means, and what it does not.

How a story is made

Every hour the paper reads around ninety news feeds, from the BBC, the ABC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNBC, 7NEWS and others. Reports of the same event from different outlets are grouped into one story, and each story is scored for how much it matters.

A story is written only once we hold the text of at least one outlet's reporting. Some outlets (Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times and others behind paywalls) reach us as headlines only: they tell us a story exists and how widely it is being reported, but nothing from them is ever used as material, because a headline is not the facts.

The article is then written by a large language model from that reporting, combining the outlets, leaving out the padding and putting the facts first. Every article lists the sources it was written from, with links, so the originals are always a tap away. When a story develops, it is rewritten from everything gathered so far and marked as updated.

The standards desk

A second, separate model reads every article before it is placed and scores it for impact, relevance and novelty. The front page is composed by an AI editor that says, in a sentence, why each story earned its place. These checks are automated: no person reads an article before it is published.

Research

The research desk reads every new AI paper posted to arXiv, scores each one, and writes up the ones that clear the bar, filed under thirteen topics. Each write-up says what the paper claims, what the authors measured, and where it falls short, and links to the paper itself.

What we use AI for, and what we do not

• We use large language models from several providers to group, score, write and edit.
• We do not invent quotes, sources or numbers. A writer instructed to use only the reporting it is given can still get things wrong, which is why every claim can be checked against the sources listed under it.
• We do not generate photographs. The images that represent articles when they are shared are typographic cards: the headline set in our own type.
• The paper is the same for every reader: one world edition, with local news for your country and city beneath it. No personalised feed.

Independence

No advertising and no third-party trackers. The paper is paid for by readers who subscribe to the research desk; the news is free.

The people

A person reads the editor's mail, checks what readers report against the sources, and corrects the paper. See corrections, or write to editor@zot.news.