Ep11 - The Opposite of AI Slop: AI, Journalism, and Government Transparency

What can AI do for journalism and government transparency when it is built for the public good?

In this episode of My Robot Teacher, Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue talk with Cal Poly professors Kim Bisheff (Assistant Professor of Journalism) and Foaad Khosmood (Forbes Professor of Computer Engineering) about AI, journalism, government transparency, and the Digital Democracy Project - a public-interest AI initiative developed at Cal Poly and partnered with CalMatters to help journalists track legislative hearings and make local and state government more legible to the public.

Sarah, Taiyo, Kim, and Foaad discuss how Digital Democracy works, why AI in journalism still needs strong guardrails, what “human in the loop” actually means, and what happens when machine attention is used in service of human judgment. They also explore the history of AI before ChatGPT, how large language models affect higher education and journalism classrooms, and what the AI era should learn from the damage done by social media and ad-tech.

Topics in this episode:
AI and journalism
Government transparency
Digital Democracy
Accountability reporting
Public-interest technology
Natural language processing
Media trust
AI in higher education
Summary, bias, and human judgment

Learn more about the Digital Democracy Project: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/
Listen to My Robot Teacher on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-robot-teacher/id1818032413

My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab, and produced by editaudio. Audio Editing by Megan Hayward, and our Production Manager is Kathleen Speckert.

📄 Full transcripts available on Substack:
https://calearninglab.org/myrobotteacher/
🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai
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CHAPTERS
00:00-3:30 Chapter 1: One year of My Robot Teacher - AI, Higher Education, a World in Chaos
3:31-6:53 Chapter 2: AI Fear, Backlash, and Public Misunderstanding
6:54-9:59 Chapter 3 - Digital Democracy: AI for Journalism and Government Transparency
10:00-14:30 Chapter 4 - AI Before ChatGPT: LLMs, NLP, and the History of AI
14:31-17:58 Chapter 5 - Can LLMs Plateau? AI, Code, and the Problem of Language + What’s Happening in the Computer Science Classroom Now
17:59-20:34 Chapter 6 - AI in Journalism Classrooms: Trust, Ethics, and Student Writing
20:35-29:55 Chapter 7 - AI Guardrails: Summary, Bias, Newsworthiness, and Human Judgment
29:56-33:47 Chapter 8 - Digital Democracy in the Classroom: AI for Accountability Reporting
33:47-38:17 Chapter 9 - Across the Silos: Journalists, Engineers, and Public-Interest Tech
38:18-44:59 Chapter 10 - After Social Media: Can AI Serve the Public Good?
45:00-51:02 Chapter 11 - AI, Attention, Democracy, and “Befriending the Monster”

#AI #Journalism #CivicTech

Видео Ep11 - The Opposite of AI Slop: AI, Journalism, and Government Transparency канала My Robot Teacher