NewsBeat

July 2023 NewsBeat 14 By SOPHIE CULPEPPER AI will soon be able to cover public meetings. But should it? T he Palm Springs Post, a hyperlocal dig- ital-first news outlet in California, be- gan as a daily email newsletter Mark Talkington would grind out in the evenings, squeezed in on top of his longtime day job as an editor for Microsoft. Since founding the newsletter in 2021, Talkington has made the Post a full-fledged news organization valued by the commu- nity — enough so that he was able to hire two additional reporters. Today, he says the Post is financially sustainable, and has 14,000 subscribers in a city of about 45,000. Following the Post's success, Talkington set his sights on launching a second hy- perlocal news product to serve the rest of the Coachella Valley. To do that, he wanted to hire a reporter whose first name is Paul (this detail will be important later) from a local newspaper. But the hire ended up not working out. Around this same time, Talkington, who told me he always tries to make his opera- tions "as efficient as possible," was one of many publishers beginning to toy with the possibilities and limitations of generative artificial intelligence, a tool with massive implications for efficiency in journalism and almost every other profession. And in early 2023, Talkington had transitioned to working on the Bing team at Microsoft. He started experimenting with AI to see how well it could summarize news, but strug- gled to overcome its hallucination tenden- cy. "It just wasn't trustworthy," he said. Yet Talkington's friend, recently re- tired engineer and former Microsoft vice president Peter Loforte, had created an AI — which Loforte nicknamed "Maria" — capable of participating in and accurately summarizing meetings. That got Talking- ton's attention — what if he could create an AI to attend, take notes and write short, hallucination-free stories about public meetings? Talkington shared his idea with Loforte, who was able to customize an AI model to do just that. Talkington dubbed this artifi- cial reporter "Paul." While Paul isn't perfect and Talkington is not currently publishing stories the model can generate, Talking- ton's early experimentation suggests that this tech could soon — very soon — be a viable tool to save reporters time by cover- ing hours-long public meetings. But even Talkington's wry choice to name the AI af- ter a reporter he did not hire speaks to an alternative direction use of this tech could take — one that some reporters (myself included, frankly) are afraid of: replacing reporters instead of assisting them. It's not difficult to picture in an industry that already ruthlessly squeezes its reporters and newspapers; wouldn't it be convenient, from an Alden executive's perspective, not to have to waste any money on a reporter's salary when you have a tool like Paul that can do a passable job in a fraction of the time for none of the cost? Exactly how this powerful tech can and should be ethically used for reporting is one of many questions Talkington is still mulling over himself — and believes every reporter should be thinking about now. Maria's backstory Loforte was inspired to develop a cus- tomized AI model ahead of a conference in Palm Springs about climate change and the Salton Sea. In an email, he told me he had initially thought about creating an AI that could draw contextual images in real time based on presentations and conversations, and pick out "contextual songs to play as background music during breaks and inter- missions." But when Loforte actually began exper- imenting with an AI he tailored to learn about the Salton Sea and climate change, as well as the conference's focus and pre- senters, "it truly got interesting," he said. Loforte was surprised by the AI's reasoning and creativity when it was instructed to summarize the climate crisis and potential solutions. When Loforte showed the confer- ence organizer an early version of the code, they suggested giving the AI a persona. "Instead of manufacturing a persona, we had the AI generate one for itself with very little parameters, other than making a per- sona from the perspective of someone who was 20 years old and lived near the Salton Sea," Loforte explained. "Maria emerged from this effort." It took Loforte about a month of coding to develop this AI model, he added — and Maria wrote most of its own code. At the conference, Maria was not only able to listen to and summarize the speak- ers, Loforte noted, but to generate real-time art based on the conversation that "ap- peared more deep in meaning than I would have thought" and to "[aggregate] with other knowledge bases to then come up with creative points of view that were be- yond just a simple summarization." When asked, for instance, to suggest solutions to the Salton Sea's environmental crisis, taking into context technologies under develop- ment and assuming unlimited funding, Maria "came up with solutions ranging from nanobots to eat the pollution to an entire domed structure around the Salton Sea." This was notable, Loforte said, because "None of the knowledge bases it read had these potential solutions." He also instruct- ed Maria to generate a list of companies and universities who might have emerging research in this area, resulting in a list of contacts. Unlike Loforte's Maria, Paul isn't an AI image, Talkington explained — "it's just software that works in the background and listens in and acts as a reporter." So far, Paul has only listened in on meetings that were pre-recorded or broadcast live on YouTube, but "were he to listen in to a live Zoom meeting we'd probably do what I do when I attend via Zoom and be listed as 'participant,'" Talkington said. Loforte could make this AI iteration do more complex tasks if desired. "It can sit there and it can draw pictures that look like Monet based on…what people are saying, but we don't need any of that," Talkington said. "All we need is a short summary of

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