What an AI news summary should do.
A summary is useful when it saves you time without changing what the reporting says. Here is exactly what a Briefly story contains, the rules its AI works under, and where AI summaries still go wrong.
Anatomy of a Briefly story
Every story in the feed is one card you can read in well under a minute, built from a single news article:
- Headline: what happened, in plain words.
- Three key points: the facts you need, in neutral language.
- Why this matters: a short note on the consequence or context.
- Full summary and background: a longer version when you tap in.
- Source: the outlet’s name and a link to the original article, plus a multi-source marker when several outlets covered the same event.
- Listen: any story can be read aloud with your device’s voice, free.
The rules the AI works under
An AI language model writes each summary from the article text. It is instructed to:
- Report what happened, never how you should feel about it
- Use measured wording: no loaded, combative, or sensational words
- Attribute every claim, accusation, and opinion to whoever made it
- Stay inside the article: no invented names, dates, or numbers
Instructions alone are not enough, so every summary also passes automated screens for loaded language, invented dates and names, and unattributed claims before it is published. Summaries that fail are rewritten under stricter rules or dropped. Opinion columns and reviews are excluded before summarizing starts.
Where AI summaries go wrong
No person reads each summary before it appears, and the screens catch some errors but not all. The mistakes that get through tend to look like this:
- Two related events merged into one, with one of the dates lost
- An action credited to the wrong party (“the UN approved” when a government did)
- A hedge dropped: “reportedly considered” becoming “said”
- A fast-moving story summarized before the facts settled
The first two are real. They appear in the sample brief on this site, which we checked against other outlets’ reporting and corrected in public. That is the practical rule for any AI summary, Briefly’s included: use it to decide what to read, and open the original article before you act on a story or share it.
Getting the most out of summaries
- Check who is being quoted: attribution tells you whose claim it is
- Prefer multi-source stories when a topic is contested
- Tap through to the original for numbers, quotes, and anything you plan to repeat
- With Briefly+, Ask Briefly answers questions about a story, up to five a day; treat its answers like the summary, as a pointer to the reporting
From single stories to a daily brief
The same summaries feed the morning and evening brief: five stories, about three minutes, read aloud by one AI narrator, with a line on how the five stories split across left-, center-, and right-leaning outlets.
