NewsBeat

July 2023 NewsBeat 16 demolition of the existing home. "The system also does a cite check for every fact presented," Loforte noted. "We learned a lot from this experiment (it wasn't perfect) and we'll continue to iterate on it." He added that "The key design point is that it's a tool for the journalist, not a replacement. It's meant to increase their productivity and also pull together addi- tional data sources to enhance the article and its value to the reader." This process amounts to "basically tak- ing Paul through journalism school" over just a couple of weekends, Talkington said. "I'm in awe of how powerful LLM based tools are, and I think most 'AI experts' are as well and didn't predict how powerful they would be this year," Loforte said. "It really is quite surprising and somewhat alarming how quickly it progressed over the last year." Where should Paul go from here? Talkington's work on Paul is entirely experimental. He isn't publishing any of Paul's reporting and is just "playing with it" without having a fully formed goal. "Peter and I are just…pushing the limits, and see- ing what the possibilities are," Talkington said. He believes that to maintain the trust of his audience at The Palm Springs Post, it's critically important for them to know that humans produce the reporting they read. So "I don't know that I'm going to use [Paul] personally for my business," he said. That said, Talkington also believes that now is the right time to be creating, and tinkering with, Paul. His hope for Paul is not to replace reporters, but to make their jobs more manageable. He's considering developing a tool that reporters everywhere could use to save time by listening to pub- lic meetings and giving them a recap. He thinks this could take the form of an inter- face where "any reporter can just enter in a URL to a live meeting, and Paul will attend that meeting." Talkington knows from ex- perience how much time public meetings, which typically run late into the evening, can sap from reporters. He hopes a tool along the lines of Paul could give reporters back some of their lives, or give them more time to focus on other work. And, he noted, reporters already watch recorded meetings a day later in some cases due to schedul- ing conflicts; perhaps an AI model could eventually allow for more timely reporting in those instances, he suggested. "What is the biggest time suck as a reporter? It's going to these six-hour-long City Council meetings, taking 200 pages of notes for an eight-inch story," he said. Talkington sees the promise of AI to boost reporting power, allow journalists to spend their time more efficiently, and even give them back more free time off the clock. But he's realistic about the possibility that the technology could lead to layoffs in some newsrooms. What's more, Talkington believes a hu- man touch is critical for reader trust. In the Post's newsroom, "the relationship we have with our audience, and the trust we've built with our audience, is because human beings are doing the work and driving the show and interacting with them," he said. "Being able to use AI to help you more efficiently complete some very mundane tasks seems fine to me. But at the end of the day, I think it has to be a human being who has the final say, has the final edit, and looks over all this. Because it'll bite you — it could cer- tainly bite you if just left to run by itself." Throughout our conversation, to wrap my head around the implications of a tool like Paul, I kept trying to picture a wunder- kind chatbot covering some of the public meetings I have reported on. Sure, I could have gone to bed far earlier many nights, and perhaps covered other stories, if Paul could have packaged the endless School Committee or Planning Board meetings into stories for me. But I certainly couldn't see Paul having an unexpected, candid conver- sation with a public official about facing sexism in a leadership position walking to the parking lot at 11 p.m. after a grueling meeting — a conversation that, as I see it, happened not just because of sitting through that night's meeting, but from gradually becoming a familiar presence from sitting through so many meetings before that. I couldn't see Paul noticing Town Meeting Members (elected represen- tatives of a sort of hyperlocal Congress — as New England as you get) knitting in between critical votes, or picking up on the palpable joy and camaraderie of returning to an in-person meeting after three years spent remote because of COVID. I eventual- ly tried to articulate the abstract question I kept coming back to: What would be lost if a high-powered AI bears witness at a local government meeting, and no human re- porter has to do the unglamorous work of showing up? Talkington had examples of his own, bringing up an instance where two public officials might exchange a wink at a public meeting. "I can't foresee Maria or Paul being able to catch that subtlety," he said, "or to be out in the hallway before a vote is cast, or to be able to know which way a council is leaning based just on a few comments that they make during deliberations and being able to tweet [informed predictions] out…before they actually take the vote." "All those subtleties that make for a real- ly good reporter who covers his or her beat really well — I can't foresee AI being rolled into a room and doing that stuff," he said. "But wouldn't it be nice if the AI is at least taking your notes for you?" That capacity alone, Talkington argued, could give a re- porter more headspace to pay attention to the meeting itself, and make the reporting better. Talkington does not pretend to have the answers to the bigger-picture ethical quan- daries artificial intelligence presents for journalism. "Ultimately, I'm just a guy who doesn't want to spend six hours every other week attending a City Council meeting," he said. "A lot of what I was doing in AI was purely selfish, just to save myself time — because when you're working 100 hours a week between a startup media company and a ginormous software company, you'll do anything to save yourself some time and be able to sleep some more." But whether people like it or not, the technology "is here," Talkington said. "This is like electricity; it's going to change our lives and change our world. It's not going away." He believes "the sooner you figure out how to utilize AI in your job, the more marketable you will be…so don't be afraid of it — rush toward it and make it what it should be before maybe somebody makes it what it shouldn't be." He's confident many people are already working on their own versions of Paul, and could well be further ahead than he is. "Is it ready for primetime, ready to be released to the masses? Absolutely not," Talkington said. "There's just a lot of dis- cussions that need to take place. But can it be done? Can you design an AI system that attends a city meeting and generates a story? Yeah, I did it." This article was originally published by niemanlab.org and is reprinted here with permission. AI: Continued from page 15

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