Should AI cover your city council meeting? Prevalence of AI-generated articles summarizing public meetings grows in San Mateo County

In San Mateo County, where AI is beginning to become incorporated into some elements of local journalism, answers to those questions are limited. The experimentation, however, is beginning, largely in the form of summary-style articles that cover governmental and municipal meetings. The San Mateo Daily Journal does not use AI in any form, but others are trying out the technology.

Coastside News Group, a digital news organization that covers from Pescadero to Pacifica, recently brought to life an AI tool of its own, dubbed Coastie. Coastie, which is run by a company called Locunity, produces synopses of agency meetings on the coast from city council to water and sewer districts in an article, topic-specific format, complete with quotes.

“This lets us cover a lot of these agency meetings. In a way, it’s really more information than news,” Coastside News Group CEO Richard Klein said. “We’re still kind of in the late stages of testing, and, but we were hoping that we would get a lot of interesting background on all of these various agency meetings, and so far, I think that that’s panned out pretty well.”

The goal of Coastie is not to replace the journalists who work at Coastside News, Klein — who is an investor in Locunity — argued, but the opposite. He’s hopeful the tech will allow journalists to not get bogged down with watching and attending meetings so they can be out in the community, a point Locunity CEO Jonathan Bash echoed.

“We think journalists need to do journalism, and our role is more of, I would call it a civic intelligence service,” he said.

Locunity, which also partners with local governments to create these synopses, isn’t the only organization with the idea. Citizen Portal AI is another such business. It charges a subscription fee that grants access to a bevy of AI-generated articles scraping around 18,000 municipalities for content, including the Foster City Council.

Citizen Portal, which was created by the founder of Ancestry.com, is aiming to make government more transparent and legible for citizens, General Manager Thomas Dyches said. Like Bash and Klein, he doesn’t see it as a replacement for local journalists, but as a tool.

“Journalists can’t get to everything. They’re not going to go to everything,” Dyches said. “What I hope is, local journalists use us as a source. They can actually verify what was said.”

AI ‘reporters’

Other outlets that cover San Mateo County, like Hoodline — an organization that aggregates reporting from other news organizations — also use AI in their articles. Hoodline puts names of “reporters” on its stories with a notice that they are AI-generated, and did not immediately respond to request for comment on its AI and media policies.

“We have established an In-House Writing Collective to ensure that the content you trust and rely on continues to meet the standards of journalistic excellence,” its website reads. “A full team may use a single professional pen name or ‘persona’ in place of the multiple names of the team members, reflecting our collaborative approach that emphasizes the editorial professionalism that includes both hard-working people and carefully tailored AI tools.”

Generally, newsrooms that are having the most success with AI are those that are using it on the backend as a tool for human journalists, either via data analysis, meeting summarization, or to get updates on website or news changes, Djordje Padejski, Stanford University John Knight Journalism Fellowships associate director, said.

“I think we’re understanding these tools can be used in kind of smart and responsible way, and any product that comes out without a pure human check, human verification, human in the loop, are really set to fail,” he said.

Research shows that audiences are not drawn to fully-automated writing without human fact-checking, Padejski said, information that becomes more stark when contrasted against recent statistics from up to 50% of articles generated on the internet are primarily AI-generated.

“For computer scientists, 80% or even higher accuracy rate for AI tools is unbelievable accomplishment,” he said. “But in journalism … we don’t tolerate 80% accuracy, right? So, that’s sort of that fundamental tension between journalism and AI.”

Verification is something that companies like Locunity and Citizen Portal are grappling with as well.

Verification challenges

Because Citizen Portal is producing up to 24,000 articles a day, verification can be a challenge, Dyches said, however, there is an option for viewers to report any mistakes. Currently, the transcripts posted of meetings are anywhere from 90% to 100% accuracy, but Dyches believes there’s a future where it’s 100% every time.

“It will get to 100% in the next five to 10 years. If we were to disappear today there would be other companies that would come in,” he said. “I think it’s going to get to the point where AI will expose everything — every penny and every word. That’s coming, for sure.”

A copy editor reviews the names in Coastie’s stories, Klein said, although the process doesn’t include a full-breasted double check for accuracy. As Locunity scales its product, human oversight might take a back seat, Bash said, but that will come in tandem with higher accuracy scores.

“We will probably hit a point where we need to make some hard choices on how much human intervention, and one of the strategies to do that is we score the level of confidence in accuracy for every piece before it goes out,” he said.

Accountability

Ultimately, it will be up to local papers themselves to decide how to incorporate AI in a way that benefits their audience, Padejski said, noting that journalists with the skill set to manage the technology might become increasingly valuable. While the future of the technology and the ways in which it develops are uncertain, it’s his view that a human level of accountability will always be necessary.

“I still believe in humanity. You know, you can come back to me in 20 years and say, ‘Oh, look, you were wrong,’ but I believe that there’s going to be still need for humans to take those AI tools accountable,” Padejski said.