A couple of years ago, Joel Lederman, now 16, asked himself an interesting question: Could artificial intelligence have a positive impact on news deserts?
“My interest is mostly in democratic engagement, like civic engagement,” Joel said. “How can we inform citizens of what goes on in the government?”
What started as a science fair project at Waltham’s Gann Academy quickly escalated, and Joel wound up competing all the way up to the State level. Although he didn’t win any awards for his research, he moved forward with the concept.
“I still thought it was a worthwhile idea, and I wanted to keep working on it because I thought ‘I could turn this into reality. I could turn this into something that could be absolutely revolutionary,’” he said. “I started working on this software that transcribes local town committee meetings in Marblehead, and then it sort of funnels it into Chat GPT with specific commands and specific programming so that it will format into an article.
“I’ve taken some computer science classes in school and also learned out-of-school to help me build this, and it has been sort of an interesting process that I’ve enjoyed. But I would say the most interesting part of this to me is definitely the humanity side — like, how can this be applied to government?”
All About Town — Joel’s website, allabouttown.com, was launched at the beginning of this year. Since then, Joel has reported on Select Board meetings, School Committee meetings, and Board of Health meetings. The website also has a tab dedicated to Special Meetings, such as Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer’s State of the Town presentation.
The AI program Joel uses takes a YouTube or Vimeo link and outputs three types of summaries that are all available on the All About Town website.
The first is a long-form summary, which has a section-by-section overview of the meeting with timestamps and paragraph entries. The second is what Joel calls a “one-pager,” which is an about 300-word summary of the meeting. And the third is a timeline that simply has bolded discussion topics along with the timestamps of each conversation.
He said that his program isn’t foolproof but doesn’t pull information from thin air. All information on All About Town is specific to the meetings in question; it just may not be able to get civilian names spelled correctly since they aren’t readily available, say on the School Committee’s website, for example. It does synthesize the facts correctly, though.
Although Joel has shown that utilizing AI for journalistic purposes has been effective, he was quick to say that All About Town and any similar models are not replacements for journalists.
“A lot of people throughout the process while I was working on this project asked me: Is this a threat to human work? And the answer I’ve always given is, ‘No, because I’m not a journalist. It’s not writing articles. It’s writing summaries, and it’s not going after the market that’s already there. It’s filling a gap that’s already opened. I don’t see this ever taking human jobs because it can’t do what a human can do. It’s sort of just for the basis of summary and a lot of people to see which parts of meetings they want to go watch.’”
When circling back to his original question of whether AI can assist in news deserts, Joel’s answer was a resounding “yes.”
“I would say in Marblehead there is the Marblehead Current and the Marblehead Weekly which do report on the committees in Marblehead, so it’s possible that there’s not the largest audience for this, specifically in Marblehead, but this is sort of the philanthropic testing of the product to see if it can work in Marblehead, it definitely could be expanded to other towns that maybe are experiencing more of a news desert than Marblehead,” Joel said.
“The whole idea of this with Marblehead is like a beta test. Can this software work? What do people think of it? How does it actually function in the real world? I’ve been working on it for so long and just personally showing it to friends and family, but in the future, the vision of this was to continue to expand and provide this to other towns that are experiencing possibly more troubles than Marblehead in terms of news deserts.”
