Notice
AI & Automated Analysis
What automated assistance does in Tortoise, what it does not do, and how an output can always be traced back to the material it came from.
What AI can assist with
Automated assistance may be used for:
- Summarization
- Theme identification
- Information retrieval
- Document comparison
- Comment organization
- Draft reporting
- Answering questions about a project
What AI does not determine
Automated assistance does not automatically determine:
- Public consensus
- Project approval
- Planning recommendations
- Agency policy
- Legal compliance
- Final decisions
Accuracy and review
AI outputs may contain mistakes or omit context. They are a reading aid, not a finding.
Professional review is required where an output influences planning work. A human decision-maker remains responsible for every decision.
Source transparency
Original source material is preserved. Original comments are not overwritten, replaced, or edited by an automated process.
Where a summary is generated from comments or project documents, the original material remains available for review, and an authorized user can move from the summary back to the source.
Original input
Kept as written.
AI-assisted interpretation
Summary or grouping.
Human-reviewed result
Stands behind it.
Labels
Where a summary is shown, it is labelled AI-assisted, with an explanation available in place.
Tortoise does not label an automated output as AI Consensus, Community Consensus, or an Official Finding unless human or project-team review has actually established that characterization.
How our systems are described
Tortoise describes what its features do for a user. It does not publish the internal prompts, scoring formulas, orchestration, ranking logic, moderation rules, or decision-traceability mechanisms that produce an output.
That keeps proprietary methods and any potentially protectable mechanism available for review rather than disclosed.