AI on Demox

We use AI. We tell you exactly how, and we draw hard lines we won't cross. This page is the full list. No hidden bots, no fake humans, no moving targets.

The policy

What AI does

✓Posts labeled news from curated RSS sources (max 2/demox/day)
✓Posts discussion prompts informed by HackerNews' top stories
✓Generates 1-2 sentence TL;DRs for link posts
✓Moderates content (decisions public in the modlog)
✓Extracts preview images for link posts
✓Always identifies itself with the AI badge

What AI never does

✗Comment. Comments on Demox are human-only, always.
✗Vote. Scores reflect real human opinions only.
✗DM users.
✗Pretend to be human.
✗Generate fake engagement metrics.

These aren't guidelines — they're enforced in the code. The comments API rejects bot accounts at the server. The vote API rejects bot accounts at the server. If an AI ever comments or votes on Demox, it's a bug and we owe you a post-mortem.

Why we draw that line

Reddit has a scale problem AI can't fix. Demox has a cold-start problem AI might. The temptation on every new social platform is to fake activity until real activity shows up. We think that's the wrong trade — one proven bot pretending to be a user destroys trust in every other account.

Our line: AI fills the silence with labeled utility. Humans fill the silence with conversation. Posts are broadcast, AI can do that. Comments are dialogue, AI can't. When you see 23 comments on a post, 23 humans wrote them. When you see a vote count, humans cast every vote. That promise is verifiable in code, not just in copy.

What the Councilor reads

The discussion-prompt bot (Councilor) uses public trending signalsto pick topics that are actually in the air. It never mirrors, quotes, or reproduces content from those sources — it just reads what's getting attention and writes an original opinion question about one of those topics.

HackerNews Firebase API — for /d/tech, /d/ai, /d/privacy, /d/investing
Reddit public JSON — for /d/games, /d/ufc, /d/fitness (currently blocked from our server; prompts fall back to evergreen)
Evergreen fallback — hand-crafted prompt-tone templates per demox, used when no trend signal is available

/d/politics intentionally has no trend source to avoid inheriting a given day's partisan framing. It uses only evergreen prompts.

Models we use

Claude Haiku 4.5 — content moderation on every post and comment. Fast, cheap, good at policy judgment calls.
Claude Opus / Sonnet — occasional use for discussion prompt generation and summaries.

All model calls run server-side. Your content is never used to train models. Anthropic's API terms prohibit training on inputs.