NewsBeat

July 2023 NewsBeat 15 what happened during this meeting." Both Maria and Paul "are built using a collection of publicly available models and AIs that I fine-tune, chain together, and customize in novel ways leveraging Python code," Loforte said. He has primarily relied on the library LangChain, "which enables developers to build all sorts of LLM-based solutions leveraging any number of mod- els." (Loforte does not have a journalism background, but has previously worked on developing technology and tools for writ- ers.) One important difference of the artificial intelligence driving Paul and Maria from the generic models: "I've put extra checks into my code to reduce hallucinations by having the system cite its sources," Loforte added. With prior models, "it had taken me months just to get my prompts down for Bard, and Bing, and ChatGPT…to do what I wanted," Talkington said. And during early experimentation with a Paul predecessor, when Talkington asked an AI to summarize an incident of a weapon being brandished in a local Target in a brief blurb, the AI spit out a summary hallucinating a mass shoot- ing that had left 14 people dead. Talkington said that left him thinking the technology was "like my Tesla — it's really not fully baked." Loforte emphasized how quickly the technology is developing. Some of Loforte's coding, such as for reading web content and PDF files and developing longer-term memory, has "gotten easier in just the last couple of months" — and some features are being integrated directly into ChatGPT's end-user experience. "In my 35-plus-year career in software engineering, I've never seen progress move so quickly," he said. "It is the Wild West right now." Sending Paul to J-school To begin developing Paul's capabilities, Talkington instructed the AI model to attend an online Historic Site Preservation Board meeting, "which I knew would be quick and uncomplicated," and to summa- rize the meeting and generate a short story. Talkington instructed Paul to "generally summarize the meeting, not dive in on a specific topic." This was not a meeting he would generally assign a reporter to cover, he noted. The result, Talkington said, "was about what you'd expect from a Journalism 101 student" — Paul produced a chronological account of the meeting, rather than order- ing and sorting topics by their importance, for instance. While the story "is not really suitable for publication," it still demon- strated the model's ability to listen to, summarize, and write a news story about a public meeting, Talkington said. Talkington then fed Paul "every story I've ever written, every story the Desert Sun has ever had online, everything that's ever been on the City of Palm Springs website, everything the local TV news stations have done…Paul ingested and read every sin- gle thing available online in the history of Palm Springs from every media and every official source." But Talkington added that "Paul was only exposed to information we knew would be beneficial" — for instance, his own stories to teach Paul Talkington's writing style, and the city website to "learn rather bland but fact-based information, which thankfully is the opposite of the cesspool you find on Facebook and Next- door." In Talkington's view, this approach of curating the information a reporter AI digests is important. "For a particular topic that I know is coming up on the city coun- cil agenda, for example, I would feed Paul all my past articles, and the articles from other trusted media, on just that topic," he explained. Digesting this information took the AI about a weekend, "but now he has back- ground, and he has context." Talkington noted that this is another advantage of Loforte's customized AI models: They have a greater capacity for short-term memory than, for instance, ChatGPT, he said. But in another example of how fast the technol- ogy is moving, Loforte noted that just this week, OpenAI released a new set of APIs and developer tools, including "an expand- ed 16K token memory which is significant and lends itself to being able to understand and write longer content at higher levels of accuracy." "Leveraging LangChain and other meth- ods, I'm able to create a near infinite mem- ory," Loforte added. And these newer APIs "make it relatively easy for any [competent] developer to do what I'm doing." Next, Talkington instructed Paul to attend the same City Council meeting Talkington was attending, and to pick out and summarize the discussion of one specific issue in Talkington's style — "and he did," Talkington said. The article need- ed a good copy editor and could use some additional context, but the 500-word story was of a high enough caliber to be "usable," Talkington noted. "It's certainly better than some stuff I've read at some newspapers," he said. Loforte shared an excerpt from one of the texts Paul produced when instructed to write about one specific issue from the same May 2 Historic Site Preservation Board meeting, integrating in some context drawn from other data sources about the preser- vation ordinance: During the meeting, the board discussed several key items, including the potential redesignation of a Class 4 site to a Class one or two historic resource and the recent Preservation Matters Symposium. One of the primary agenda items was the review of an application submitted by Carolyn John, who requested approval to demolish a dwelling located at 11:50 PM Monte Vista. The property in question, a single-family home constructed in 1937, has undergone several significant alterations and additions over the years. The property owner seeks to demolish the structure due to the loss of its historic integrity and its current condition. As per the Preservation Ordinance, the Historic Site Preservation Board is required to evaluate requests for the full demolition of Class 3 or 4 sites, considering the prop- erty's historical significance and integrity. However, after a thorough review of the application, staff was unable to make the findings necessary to reclassify the property as a Class one or two site. During the meeting, the board members asked questions and discussed the appli- cation. They also heard from the property owner's architect, who was available to answer any questions. After careful con- sideration, the board decided to take no further action on the redesignation request and directed staff to process the permit for Continued on Page 15

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