Last updated June 2026. Want to see how our thinking has changed over time? We keep every past version of this policy. Read them here.
When you come to Dragonfly Editorial for writing, editing, design, or content strategy, or when you join us for training, you’re trusting a team of people to do the thinking. Because that trust is the whole point, we want to be clear about exactly where AI fits into our work, and where it doesn’t.
We stay current with AI, and we’re genuinely excited about what it can do. Used well, it can take the friction out of a task, speed up the tedious parts, and give our creatives more room to focus on the work that actually matters to you. When AI helps us work more efficiently, we’re all for it.
But we approach it with clear eyes. AI is fast, and fast is not the same as good. It can be confidently wrong, inventing facts, statistics, and sources that were never real, what the industry politely calls “hallucinating.” Because it learns from what already exists, it tends to reach for average, often-used phrasing or unoriginal ideas. Left unchecked, it produces a kind of fluent, repetitive nothingness that fills a page without saying anything anew.
It can also carry bias forward without flagging it, baking stale or offensive assumptions into audience research, personas, and copy. And true thought leadership (a specific point of view, an informed opinion, original research) cannot, by definition, come from a tool that only remixes the past.
That’s why our guiding belief is simple: AI should be assistive, not autonomous. A real person is responsible for everything we deliver. AI may help along the way, but a human decides, reviews, and signs off. If we can’t explain, evaluate, and improve a piece of content ourselves, it isn’t ready to reach you.
Dragonfly is staffed with the best in the business, and we intend to stay that way. Writing, editing, and design are crafts and skills that sharpen with use and dull with neglect. Leaning on AI to do the thinking is how a team quickly loses its edge. We’d rather invest in our own expertise, deepening our command of the work, our industries, and the technology itself. We use AI where it genuinely helps, and we put the tools down when reaching for them would cost us the very expertise you came to us for.
Where we may let AI assist
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- Generating story ideas and outlines
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- Suggesting headlines and social posts
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- Running a first-pass check for spelling, punctuation, and simple grammar, so our editors can focus on clarity, readability, and flow
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- Summarizing long reports
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- Offering SEO recommendations
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- Modifying — not wholesale generating — images, designs, or videos
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- Getting up to speed on an unfamiliar topic, treating anything it tells us as unverified until we’ve fact-checked it
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- Suggesting ways to clarify confusing sentences
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- Flagging interview questions we may have missed
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- Transcribing interviews, but never without your specific permission to upload the original audio
What we will never use AI to do
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- Replace our staff or our contract Dragonflies
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- Write copy for you, start to finish (unless specifically requested)
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- Create entire images, designs, or videos for you (unless specifically requested)
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- Edit your content without careful human review of every suggested change
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- Replace credible sources: original research, real interviews, trusted reporting
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- Analyze content that is internal, confidential, or proprietary to you
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- Analyze any other content you’ve provided, unless we get your permission
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- Present AI-generated work as solely human-created, or pass off invented data, quotes, or testimonials as real
How we protect your information
The AI tools we use are private to Dragonfly, so your data is never used to train global AI models. We don’t feed confidential, restricted, or proprietary material into tools that would learn from it. And if a client agreement places limits on AI use, that agreement comes first.
Every suggestion an AI tool offers us is evaluated by a human being before it becomes part of our work.
A note on environmental impact
AI doesn’t run on nothing. The data centers behind these tools draw on real energy and water, and that footprint grows with every unnecessary query. We take that seriously. We reach for AI when it earns its keep, and we skip it when it doesn’t, rather than burning resources to generate work a person could do better. Using less, on purpose, is part of how we try to be good stewards.
Keeping our policy current
AI is moving quickly, and so is our thinking about it. We review this policy regularly and update it as tools, expectations, and the law evolve. Rather than quietly overwrite what came before, we keep every previous version as a record of changing times. You can read the edits here.
Questions about how any of this applies to your project? Reach us at info@dragonflyeditorial.com. We’re happy to walk you through it.
Additional resources
For reference, here is how other organizations we respect are addressing the use of large language models in generating content.
AI AND CONTENT WRITING
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- Marketing AI Institute: Responsible AI Manifesto
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- Harvard Business Review: How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity
AI AND SCIENTIFIC WRITING
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- Nature, along with all Springer Nature Journals: Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science: here are our ground rules for their use
AI AND HEALTHCARE COMMUNICATIONS
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- CommunicateHealth: This Wasn’t Written by a Bot
AI AND CREATIVE WRITING
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- Justine Bateman, writer and filmmaker: AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry
AI AND LEGAL WRITING
More info on the promise and threat of AI
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- Center for AI Safety: What is AI Risk?
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- Center for AI Safety: Statement on AI Risk
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- Nielsen Norman Group: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years
