By CommonWealth Beacon | October 22, 2024 5:04 PM EDT
Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2024/10/22/melrose-ai-podcast/
A new local podcast about Melrose debuted this month. For about 15 minutes, an unnamed man and woman talk about recent city zoning meetings and how local government is approaching smart growth and sustainable development goals in suburban Boston.
But the hosts are not flesh and blood people. The Melrose Update Robocast was created by putting public documents into an artificial intelligence program that then generates a conversation about the problems with these fake people. The creator doesn’t try to hide that, even leaving little quirks to indicate an inhuman feeling, like the AI-generated logo that adds an extra “e” to the end of Melrose.
“AI caught my attention in a new and stimulating way, as it did most people, right when ChatGPT was released,” says Robocast creator Tom Catalini of Melrose.
Catalini is a former local cable access show host Let’s talk Melrose, Melrose, a pandemic-era project discussing local goings-on that ran for 200 episodes and ended on Valentine’s Day 2024.
“One of the thoughts I had – being someone who was somewhat interested and thoughtful and somewhat involved in conversations in the community – was that I wondered quite quickly whether there was a [AI] application in that space,” Catalini said.
The Artificial Intelligence tool of the day – Google’s NotebookLM – is all over the web with its handy tools for document summaries and buzzy, artificially generated podcast-like conversations.
ChatGPT felt clunky when it came to analyzing local policy documents, Catalini said, but something about NotebookLM’s voices felt more “credible,” even if they continued to sound somewhat inhuman and generic. So he put destination documents into NotebookLM, created a podcast conversation, and hit publish on Spotify.
Catalini’s home base of Melrose, like many cities and towns, is feeling the decline of journalism.
At one point, the Boston suburb of about 29,000 had some decent reporting options: a weekly newspaper, a dedicated Patch reporter and occasional coverage from the state-run newspapers or NPR radio stations. Now the local Patch – a digital news site – focuses primarily on news from across the state or the neighboring community. The Melrose weekly news – a family business – contains announcements and short profiles of local businesses and events, sports scores and obituaries. The shutters Melrose Free Presswhich was active for 119 years until 2021, is being redirected to the generic Wicked Local homepage, which no longer has a dedicated Melrose tag.
The city’s policies can occasionally gain statewide and even national attention, as when Melrose followed Brookline’s example by implementing a generation-long tobacco ban. But increasingly, city websites themselves or local conversation podcasts can become the main source of news.
Catalini sighs as he describes Melrose’s news options over the 25 years since he moved to the city with his wife, which felt “robust” at the time. Now almost no one reports on hyper-local news, like vote-tapping or digging through the overwhelming documentation surrounding proposed zoning policies, he said.
“In a sense, what I’m talking about is an act of desperation,” he said of the Robocast. “I think there is a greater need for local reporting because the world is becoming more complex and there is more information available to us, the issues are more nuanced and everything is happening at a faster pace. I would argue that the need for local journalism and reporting is greater, not less. And while I’m excited about it, I don’t think this approach is in any way a replacement.”
Catalini’s experiment in Melrose is in conversation with other recent efforts to address the apparent shortages of local news in Massachusetts through artificial intelligence. A local startup pitched AI-written articles about Arlington meetings last year, even though no posts have appeared on that site since June and the local news channel YourArlington has been around for nearly two decades.
Like other AI technology, NotebookLM’s friendly-sounding artificial voices can feel like a potential balm for under-covered news areas, as long as creators and listeners are willing to overcome concerns about the accuracy and business model of the underlying technology.
Large artificial intelligence language models, such as the ubiquitous ChatGPT, are known to hallucinate facts and quotes as they create text based on the most likely set of words. Their success, according to multiple lawsuits against AI language and image generators, depends on a massive theft of copyrighted material to train these tools, raising tens of billions of dollars in venture capital funding. The power required to sustain artificial intelligence is driving up emissions and even leading to a plan by Microsoft to reopen the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear site to power its AI systems.
Sarah Scire, deputy editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, discussed the rise of AI in newsrooms in an episode of The Codcast last winter. The lab isn’t entirely supportive of the idea of integrating AI tools into news, describing it as a way to help under-resourced newsrooms where reporters simply can’t attend every citizen meeting under the sun.
“I think the problem with these AI-generated articles is that the writing is poor and the reporting is not accurate, and those are two pretty critical things for journalists and for journalism,” she said. Compared to human writing, she says, AI-generated prose is “boring, unoriginal, and often wrong in ways that are difficult to detect, both for the journalists using the technology and for the readers themselves. ”
Scire said the “human hand” is an essential part of keeping artificial intelligence on track.
Initially, there was very little posted information about what kind of artificial intelligence was used to create the Melrose Robocast. It was pitched as local issues were searched by artificial intelligence to “get to the heart of the matter quickly and easily.” Let the robots read all the documents and analyze the meeting transcripts.”
Catalini updated the podcast description to note that the content is entirely AI-generated with no human fact-checking, created by loading publicly available documents and meeting transcripts into NotebookLM. He may or may not continue the project, which at its core was a technical experiment born of the frustration of living in a functional news desert.
In more and more places like Melrose, “we have nothing else,” Catalini said. “So if I march through the desert for four months and you offer me hot chocolate, it will taste great, even though I would like a liter of ice-cold water. So this is something. It’s not nothing.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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