AI Usage Policy

1. The core rule

AI does not write Four Loons reviews. AI does not assign star ratings, numerical scores, or editorial verdicts. AI does not determine whether a restaurant is recommended or not. Those judgments belong to the humans who ate the food, observed the room, drank the cocktails, and made repeat visits to calibrate their impressions.

This is not a guideline or a preference — it is an operational rule enforced by our editorial workflow. Reviews enter the publishing queue through a process that requires a named, accountable reviewer who visited the restaurant. No review publishes without that reviewer's direct authorship and sign-off on the rating.

2. Where we do use AI

AI tools assist with a defined set of production, research, and technical tasks. The current list is:

• Research assistance. When a reviewer is preparing to visit a restaurant, AI tools may be used to aggregate publicly available background: the chef's prior work history, previous press coverage, menu context, and neighborhood history. This research informs preparation; it does not replace observation or substitute for the reviewer's own judgment at the table.
• Drafting assistance. A reviewer may use AI to help organize notes, suggest structural approaches to a draft, or identify gaps in a piece in progress. The reviewer reads, revises, and is responsible for the final text. We do not publish prose that a reviewer cannot stand behind word by word.
• Metadata and tagging. AI assists with generating venue tags (cuisine type, neighborhood, price tier, dietary options) from structured editorial notes. Tags are reviewed by an editor before they publish.
• Search and discovery. The site's internal search uses AI-assisted indexing and ranking to surface relevant results.
• Illustration. Some editorial illustrations on Four Loons are AI-generated. These are labeled at the point of use. Photographs of actual venues, dishes, and spaces are not AI-generated and will never be presented as photographic documentation if they are.
• Layout and production assistance. AI tools assist editors with copyediting suggestions, headline options, and layout decisions. Final choices are human.

3. What AI never does at Four Loons

To be explicit about the boundaries, AI is not used for:

• Writing or substantially drafting any rated review, essay, or reported piece under a Four Loons byline without disclosure.
• Assigning or suggesting a star rating, numerical score, or any component of the scoring rubric.
• Determining whether a venue is recommended, discouraged, or not covered.
• Moderation decisions about comments or accounts — those are made by human editors.
• Processing personal data about readers for profiling or targeting purposes.
• Generating images presented as photographic documentation of a real venue or dish.

4. Human review of all editorial content

Every piece that publishes on Four Loons — review, essay, guide, or reported feature — goes through the following human steps before it is live:

• Authorship by a named reviewer or contributor who takes responsibility for the content.
• Editorial review by at least one editor, who checks the piece against our scoring rubric, our ethics standards, and our factual accuracy norms.
• Rating sign-off: the rating is confirmed by the reviewer and initialed by the assigning editor in our publishing system.
• Disclosure check: any comps, hosted visits, or AI-generated elements are noted before the piece publishes.

AI assistance at any stage of a piece's production does not replace these steps. It does not abbreviate editorial review. It does not change who is accountable for the published result.

5. Disclosure practices

When AI-generated content appears in a piece, we disclose it. For illustrations, the disclosure appears adjacent to the image. For any unusual use of AI drafting assistance beyond what is described in Section 2 above, we will add an editorial note to the piece. We do not treat AI assistance in research or structural drafting as requiring per-piece disclosure, for the same reason we do not disclose that an editor used a spell-checker — that kind of assistance does not change what the piece says, who visited the restaurant, or what score the reviewer assigned.

If our use of AI changes in a meaningful way — for example, if we begin using AI to generate first drafts of a new content type — we will update this page before that practice begins, and we will disclose it on the affected content.

6. Reader data and AI

We do not send personal reader data — email addresses, account profiles, comment text attributed to specific accounts, or IP addresses — to AI systems for processing. The details of our data practices are in our Privacy Policy, including the section specifically about AI tools and reader data. In brief: your personal information does not go into AI pipelines, and we do not permit AI providers to train on user-generated content from Four Loons.

7. Questions

If you have a question about whether and how AI was used in a specific piece, write to editors@fourloons.com with the piece's URL. We will tell you. Transparency about our tools is part of the same editorial honesty that governs how we visit restaurants and write our reviews.