To give a couple of examples, I mean, I mentioned, being able to monitor a local government proceedings when you can’t be there as, as one of them. But like, big picture across the organization, we have a gold mine of historical archives that exist in various states whether that’s tape or various forms of hardware storage or on the cloud.
I was talking to someone at one of our stations in Buffalo, and he was showing me all these paper logs from the eighties. And he was like, “how do I get these into a database? Because this is making me…I’m trying to do this by hand. I’ve been working on this for 10 years now, and I’m not making any progress.” And I’m like, yes, yes, yes. There are things we can do. And I got really excited ’cause he was saying, “We’re thinking a lot about as an organization about the concept of connection with our communities.” Take AI out of it and whatever is coming from a technology perspective at the end of the day, and we all do our work as exchanges between people, and this is really the time more than ever to be there for our communities.
And so, this engineer that I was talking to about the archive project was saying, “We get calls all the time from the community that’s like, you know, it’s my husband’s birthday and I have always wanted to find this game in high school where he made this amazing catch and you guys were there and can you help me find it?”
And this engineer in Buffalo has a real passion for helping people find that stuff. We can do that now. Those are the things that I get a real thrill about.
And so, as we’re talking with people, there are a couple of questions we’re asking because these aren’t gonna be top-down initiatives. If it’s a top-down initiative, that’s a mistake because what is a top-down initiative gonna look like? It’s gonna be like, how are we gonna save money? It has to be as much, if not more, a ground up operation of a couple of questions. One, what parts of your job are just killing you that you hate to do? That’s the versioning. There’s a number of other things we could talk about there, but also what have you wanted to do that you can’t do?
Data is another one that comes up a lot from our newsrooms in terms of processing data, monitoring data, flagging anomalies in data for story ideas.
I think the possibilities are really rich when it comes to the opportunity to get people past the initial fear of a conversation about AI and just get to the brainstorming possibilities, right? Like, when’s the last time that people have really had time, I mean in a newsroom, where there’s so, so, so much to do and so little time in a day, to innovate and think differently in a world where the possibilities are not endless, but they’re certainly significantly broader today than they’ve ever been.
TVSPY: It sounds like you are leaning more towards the meme that says something like, I want AI to do the dishes and clean the house so I can do art and photography rather than have AI do art and photography so I can do the dishes and clean the house.