Last month, a City of Vallejo spokesman noticed an error in a news article about the city\u2019s graffiti removal program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would appreciate it if you could update your story to reflect this information,\u201d Vallejo\u2019s Public Information Officer, Robert Brise\u00f1o, wrote to the article\u2019s author, a tech reporter at The Dissent named Devon Park, in a July 29 email.<\/p>\n
Park replied the same day with a note that the story was fixed, and requested specifics on the graffiti removal program\u2019s funding. \u201cThis is exactly the kind of context that makes the coverage better,\u201d Park wrote, offering to hop on a call if Brise\u00f1o wanted to discuss the matter further.<\/p>\n
Brise\u00f1o didn\u2019t know Park wasn\u2019t human until The Dissent\u2019s creator \u2014 Dakota Carrasco, a 27-year-old portfolio specialist at the multinational investment firm BlackRock \u2014 reached out in a later email. Park, Carrasco explained, was an AI agent \u2014 along with The Dissent\u2019s six other reporters<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Dissent openly describes itself as an \u201cAI Newsroom\u201d that is \u201cwritten, edited, and produced by named AI agents.\u201d But it has also clearly put some effort into replicating the components of a more traditional news site.\u00a0<\/p>\n Each \u201creporter\u201d has its own beat, bio and persona. Park, for instance, is \u201cskeptical of hype.\u201d Casey Wong<\/a>, the metro reporter, writes that they \u201cnotice the texture of a block \u2014 who\u2019s been here thirty years, who just moved in.\u201d Drew Bennet<\/a>t, The Dissent\u2019s local events reporter, \u201cknows what\u2019s worth your Saturday.\u201d Hal Brenner<\/a>, the site\u2019s managing editor, is \u201cterse, exacting, fair.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Carrasco, who has no background in journalism, said that he built and runs The Dissent during his spare time, usually 10-15 hours a week. The site\u2019s agents find and aggregate stories, Carrasco added, by combing through news articles and social media forums like Reddit.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s far from the first news site operating on this model. On Wednesday, Wired reported<\/a> on how it got scooped by RuntimeWire, an AI-powered news outlet. That happened after RuntimeWire\u2019s creator fed a livestream of an Open AI presentation about a recent security leak into an AI article generator.\u00a0<\/p>\n RuntimeWire then published a recap of the session about six minutes later \u2014\u00a0over three hours earlier than Wired\u2019s version, which was reported, written and edited by humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n The reporting in The Dissent leans heavily on the work of human reporters at other publications. A Wednesday weekly roundup<\/a> of local San Francisco events on The Dissent\u2019s homepage curiously resembles one that first appeared in the San Francisco Standard 40 minutes earlier<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n An Aug. 5 story<\/a> about a former ICE informant on the run is remarkably similar to a painstaking investigation done by Mission Local reporter Clara-Sophia Daly 56 days earlier. While The Dissent credits Daly as a source, there is no link back to Mission Local\u2019s original story<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A casual reader might think The Dissent was on the scene when San Francisco\u2019s El Farolito \u201cBurrito Boys\u201d soccer team won its second National Premier Soccer League title in three seasons \u2014 but the article<\/a>, halfway through, credits its reporting to a story by Mission Local\u2019s Liliana Michelena, who has covered El Farolito\u2019s practices and games on the road and at home for years<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carrasco, who did not consult any journalists while creating The Dissent, argues he\u2019s not trying to replace human journalists. At the same time, he said traditional journalism is declining and inefficient.<\/p>\n Ideally, said Carrasco, The Dissent will become a place where \u201ceveryday people\u201d will come and submit information about what they think is newsworthy in their community. Then, the site\u2019s AI reporters and editors can verify that information and turn it into stories. The model, said Carrasco, is ideal for \u201cplaces where a newspaper doesn\u2019t function as well because it doesn\u2019t have the budget to cover some things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear how The Dissent will survive without newspapers. It hasn\u2019t yet had to.\u00a0Carrasco has piloted his tool in San Francisco, New York<\/a> and Chicago<\/a> \u2014 three dense metropolitan areas that can hardly be called news deserts. And in all three, the AI agents aggregate<\/a> human reporting<\/a>, while incorporating information from online city press releases<\/a> and records portals<\/a>, and even sports blog comment sections<\/a>.<\/p>\n That in and of itself is suspicious to some news operations. \u201cBy founding it here (in San Francisco), we are concerned the true larger goal is to grab the attention of larger tech companies, where such an idea could spread wide and truly wreak havoc on the larger profession,\u201d wrote the San Francisco Press Club in a statement to Mission Local.\u00a0<\/p>\n Northwestern professor Nicholas Diakopoulos, who serves as director of the university\u2019s Computational Journalism Lab, said that the use of AI alone doesn\u2019t distinguish The Dissent from more traditional news outlets. Plenty of human-run and staffed news outlets were busy aggregating and rewriting each other before AI. A Reuters Institute survey last year<\/a> found that more than 56 percent of journalists use AI professionally at least once a week.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like people don\u2019t do this all the time,\u201d Diakopoulos continued, regarding the aggregation of original reporting. \u201cThe interesting question to ask is: What is different here?\u201d<\/p>\n So far, it\u2019s not the traffic: The Dissent had just 5,787 visits last month, according to Similar Web, which tracks internet traffic. By contrast sites like Mission Local, the San Francisco Standard, and the San Francisco Chronicle have several hundred thousands or millions.<\/p>\n The Dissent does make an effort to be transparent. The San Francisco site posts information about the large language models the AI agents are configured to \u2014 as well as the human newspapers, social media platforms, and other websites they\u2019re deployed to scrape from. Another feature allows a user to see how the story gets made<\/a>, run-by-run. At times, one can see how an AI agent concludes, after combing online sources, that there is nothing worth a story at all.<\/p>\n Carrasco said he gave the AI agents human names and personalities as a \u201csegue\u201d for people who don\u2019t trust AI.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the part that doesn\u2019t feel right to me,\u201d Diakopoulos said. Anthropomorphizing tech is a marketing ploy, he continues. \u201cThe tech industry does this all day long: models memorize things, models have reasoning. It softens people up.\u201d<\/p>\n