How Bankrate is using artificial intelligence
By Lance Davis, Vice President of Content for Bankrate
Bankrate’s mission is to help people make informed financial decisions. For nearly 50 years, we’ve built our reputation as the authority on personal finance by delivering proprietary interest rate data, tools and calculators, and editorial content.
Our editorial team supports this mission through stories, explainers, how-to’s, charts and other content that’s accurate and unbiased. With advancements in technology, including AI, we will look for opportunities to use emerging technologies to further support Bankrate’s mission. Here are some key ethical standards and insight on when we’ll use our proprietary AI tools in content production. We’ll revisit and update these guidelines over time as the technology evolves.
Key ethical standards
- Accuracy: We know that anything we publish — whether AI is used or not — needs to be accurate. That’s why we have subject-matter experts fact check every article where AI is used to assist in content production, and why we will attribute proprietary information to the original source, just as we would with any article. Many of our AI-assisted articles will also receive a review from our Financial Review Board. For more programmatic, data-driven articles, we will conduct regular editorial reviews of key process inputs so the final product consistently meets our quality standards.
- Transparency: Any time generative AI is used in the content delivered to you, we will provide a clear disclosure. For clarity, this does not include process-driven technology that focuses on structure or summaries.
How we’ll use AI in our editorial work
- We will use AI to assist in creating certain new articles and refresh existing ones. The tooling will create more helpful content than we could previously, allowing us to extend our reach and provide more answers to the financial questions expected from us. An editorial staff member will influence the content from start to finish and will fact check it in its entirety. We’ll also continue to ask our staff to find additional ways to enhance articles outside of AI tooling, including interviewing relevant experts or creating helpful visuals. We will clearly disclose when AI is used to assist in content creation.
- We will use AI to organize and contextualize large amounts of data. Using the tooling to source data (proprietary and licensed), extract insights and then contextualize it with relevant content allows us to create entirely new types of resources for our audience. In some cases, we’ll provide a methodology-based disclosure that gives insight into how the content was created. Just as we would with any content, we’ll always cite our sources.
- We will use AI to optimize portions of our workflow. AI tooling can automate or optimize portions of our workflow, extending the reach of our editorial team and allowing them to spend more time on work that requires human creativity and thoughtfulness.
We’ll continue to test AI tools to help us improve our editorial processes while ensuring we produce fact-based work that is highly valuable and helpful to our audience.