How Bonus.com Uses AI
Bonus.com covers gambling sites and apps for readers who spend their own money. That’s a big deal and raises the bar on everything we publish. It’s why we’re putting in writing how artificial intelligence (AI) does and does not factor into our work.
The short version: AI is a tool our editorial staff use, the way they use a spreadsheet, operating system, style guide, or search engine. It does not report, test platforms, or inform our opinions, and it does not publish any content. Every page on this site is written and reviewed by named members of our editorial team, and their names are on it.
Because the work differs by content type, this policy is broken into three parts: our reviews, our evergreen guides, and our news desk. Each one sets out what AI helps us do and what AI will never do for us.
1. Our Reviews
Every Bonus.com review is built on first-hand testing. A member of our team registers the account, makes the deposit, plays the games, and requests the withdrawal. The ratings you see come out of our own scoring formulas, run against that testing data. AI helps us organize and process what our testers collect. But it never substitutes for the testing itself.
What AI Helps Us Do
At Bonus.com, AI helps us:
- Ingest large quantities of raw testing data.
- Check for testing procedure for gaps.
- Clean up stray grammar and spelling mistakes after an editorial pass.
- Execute the mathematical formulas that feed our review rating system.
- Look up basic, publicly available facts, such as a casino’s corporate address or the location of its terms page.
- Format testing screenshots and images to site standards.
What AI Will Never Do For Us
On the other hand, at Bonus.com, AI will never:
- Fake or forge collected data.
- Offer an opinion on ranking one platform above another.
- Make an editorial decision that belongs on an editor’s desk.
- Substitute material found on the web for real testing data and first-hand accounts.
- Override the proprietary formulas at the foundation of our testing procedure.
Expert Insight:
As our reviews become more intensive and more focused on the people reading them, AI plays an administrative and organizational role. That role is entirely dependent on rigorous testing and firsthand insight delivered by a person. Without a human expert testing the products for quality and fairness, the AI has no data to sort and weigh. Put it this way: automation works great in spreadsheets, but it has no real experience playing at a casino.
2. Our Evergreen Guides
Our evergreen pages are the explainers, how-to guides, and reference pages readers come back to: how deposits and withdrawals work, what a bonus actually pays out, which operators are licensed where, and how prediction markets differ from sportsbooks. These pages change constantly, because the industry does.
What AI Helps Us Do
On the evergreen side, AI helps the Bonus.com team:
- Research and fact-check information faster.
- Keep bonuses, promotions, and other fast-moving details current in an industry that changes week to week.
- Analyze and organize large amounts of data so we can draw useful insights from it.
- Spot outdated or conflicting information published by gambling operators.
- Help us make complex topics easier for beginners to understand.
What AI Will Never Do For Us
But AI will never:
- Publish content without human review.
- Replace our hands-on testing of casinos, sportsbooks, and prediction markets.
- Have the final say on our reviews or recommendations.
- Override our editorial standards or the judgment of the people who set them.
Expert Insight:
We handle hundreds of operators across the US iGaming marketplace, including all the site data you care about most as a player. On our evergreen pages, we lean on AI services to compile the data, statistics, and regulatory and legal guidance we need to assess operators. Having that support saves us time and lets us focus our attention on what matters most: evaluating operators honestly and effectively, so you get the information you need.
3. Our News Desk
Our news coverage is written and edited by journalists who cover this industry full time. AI supports that work. It does not do it.
What AI Helps Us Do
AI is like our news desk’s personal assistant, freeing us up to do more. It helps:
- Handle routine newsroom work so our writers and editors can spend their time on reporting.
- Run news searches and surface potential topics for a human to evaluate.
- Compile and analyze data so writers and editors can present findings in a way readers can actually use.
- Assist with story research, including identifying gaps a human writer or editor then fills.
- Help find authoritative and original angles for coverage.
- Act as a second set of eyes on grammar and facts after a human editor has already been through the copy. If anything is flagged, it’s verified again before publishing.
What AI Will Never Do for Us
AI can never take the place of real reporting. It will never:
- Publish a story that has not been edited and approved by a human.
- Replace the expertise of a writer or an editor.
- Become anything more than a tool. It is an editorial assistant, in the same way a voice assistant is a tool in other parts of life.
Expert Insight:
AI is another tool to help us cover the online gambling industry more expansively and effectively without losing that human expertise, experience, and trust. It aids editors and writers with basic tasks while freeing them to focus on more authoritative and expansive news stories they might otherwise be unable to produce. When you look at an editor’s or writer’s tool belt, AI is the newest piece of equipment.
4. Where AI Content Applies
We do not think a policy page on its own is enough. You should be able to see how this applies to the specific page you are reading when you read it.
Every article on Bonus.com carries a byline with the writer’s name, the editor or fact-checker’s name, and the date the page was last updated. In these instances, the content applies to our overall AI policy. But here’s other factors to keep in mind:
Corrections
We get things wrong sometimes, and we would rather hear about it than not. If something on Bonus.com is inaccurate or out of date, email help@bonus.com. A human reads every message sent to that address.
Third-Party Content
This policy covers content produced by the Bonus.com editorial team. It does not cover material supplied by operators, advertisers, or other third parties that appear on this site, and we cannot speak to how those companies use AI in their own work.
This Policy Will Change
These tools are moving quickly and our use of them will move with them. When it does, we will update this page and change the date at the top. The commitments in the “what AI will never do” sections are the part we do not expect to revise.