Ad Fontes Media, a media bias measurement and insights company, today announced the launch of proprietary AI-powered models for automatically scoring news articles for bias and reliability. With this technology release, Ad Fontes now provides human-plus-AI article rating capabilities, which is unique in the marketplace. Ad Fontes uses this blend of human ratings and AI to meet the demand consumers and businesses have for both high accuracy–as they should when it comes to sensitive questions about how reliable and biased news is–and massive scale, which is necessary in our vast information landscape.

Ad Fontes’ domain expertise to create this state-of-the-art AI model is built upon years of methodologically rigorous human content analysis and manual labeling. Given the company’s commitment to ensuring continued high accuracy ratings as it implements AI, the top most important stories of the day continue to be rated by politically balanced and diverse panels of human analysts to catch the nuances only humans can detect and to continuously improve our AI models, while the long-tail of articles are rated by AI. The technology will enable the company to more swiftly and accurately rate important media content in a landscape where information is generated at an unprecedented speed and scale, providing brands, advertisers and media stakeholders with the real-time insights to make informed decisions around their investments in news advertising.

Ad Fontes Media’s AI-powered media scoring technology allows the company to provide ratings for tens of thousands of top news articles on a daily basis. These AI-generated ratings are more accurate than any other automated scoring system for reliability and bias as a result of being trained on the company’s database of manually-labeled articles, which encompasses over 67,000 pieces of content. 

The cutting-edge AI models also empower advertisers and brands to exercise more control over how they advertise in the news. For the first time, advertisers are able to include reliable news domains while excluding problematic, highly opinionated or politically polarizing articles on those same sites that don’t meet their brand safety standards.

“Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults say the news media is increasing political polarization – at the root of the problem is the advertising ecosystem which has been stripping quality information providers while funding misleading and extreme content,” said Vanessa Otero, Ad Fontes Media founder and CEO. “Providing media bias intelligence with accuracy, speed and precision gives brands the insights and control needed to maximize investments in news advertising without penalizing quality information sources. In the lead-up to a likely highly contentious 2024 elections cycle, democracy will depend on a healthy media ecosystem more than ever.”

“At Ad Fontes Media, our mission has always been to enhance the way we evaluate news to positively impact the media ecosystem and bring advertisers back to quality journalism. Brand safety technology has played a role in the over-blocking of news, and the unparalleled precision of Ad Fontes Media’s tools and technology are part of the solution,” said Don Hussen, CTO of Ad Fontes Media. “With our proprietary AI-powered models, we’re enabling ad tech platforms such as DSPs and SSPs to screen out unreliable and polarizing content at the URL level across the open web, and providing contextual data providers the opportunity to layer on never-before-available reliability and bias scores at the URL level, ushering in a new era of comprehensive news assessment.”

As the media landscape continues to evolve, Ad Fontes Media remains at the forefront of innovation, driving the transformation of news evaluation with its pioneering AI-powered models.