AI policy

Our approach

The Patent is an international magazine of inventions published by WitUp Ltd. We use artificial intelligence as a tool: people decide what is published, and the editor-in-chief, Giovanni Sapere, is responsible for everything The Patent publishes, including content prepared with the help of AI.

AI in the newsroom

• AI systems help the newsroom follow its sources (patent offices, universities, research centres and trusted publishers), propose topics and prepare drafts of news articles from the sources cited in them.
• Every draft prepared with AI is read and approved by a member of the editorial staff before publication. Nothing written with AI is published automatically.
• AI also helps with summaries, headlines, links between articles, search engine data and the text of our social media posts. These are checked before they go out too.
• Articles from our historical archive were written by journalists and contributors and carry no AI label.

Labels

• Articles of the AI newsroom are drafted with AI systems from the sources cited. An article read and approved by a journalist of the editorial staff is signed by that person and carries the label «Human-Edited, AI-Assisted»; the others carry the label «AI-generated content» and no personal byline.
• «AI-generated cover image»: the cover image was generated with AI, used only when no suitable photograph is available.
• «Press release»: text published by an organisation through Press Release Studio, not written or signed by the newsroom. It goes through automatic checks, including an AI check for safety, spam and relevance; the publisher declares whether the text was written with the help of AI.
• «Partner content»: content published in agreement with a partner, kept separate from editorial content.

The Patent AI

• The Patent AI is a free assistant that answers questions about patents, inventions and innovation. It is an AI system: its answers are written by artificial intelligence.
• It answers from The Patent’s archive, news from trusted publishers, official patent data from the European Patent Office and, when needed, trusted web sources. Every statement is linked to its numbered sources; when no reliable source is found, it says so.
• Answers can contain mistakes: check the sources before relying on them. They are not legal or patent advice.
• Press releases and partner content can be cited only when relevant, always with their label, and receive no priority over other sources.
• We do not store the text of the questions. How we process the data needed to count the free questions is explained in the Privacy Policy.

AI providers

• Google (Gemini): writing and checking texts, the answers and web searches of The Patent AI, the automatic checks of press releases and AI-generated cover images.
• DeepSeek: support for some internal newsroom tools only. No personal data of readers or clients is sent to it.
• We keep an internal register of the AI systems we use, updated when they change.

Transparency under the EU AI Act

The Patent applies the transparency rules of article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act): people using The Patent AI are told that they are interacting with an AI system, and text and images generated or substantially prepared with AI are labelled as described above, even when they have been reviewed by the editorial staff.

Contact

To report an error or ask a question about our use of AI, write to editorialstaff@thepatent.news. For personal data, write to privacy@witup.ai.