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"This Journalism Professor Made a NYC Chatbot in Minutes. It Actually Worked"
A lot of interesting quotes in this interview in The Markup with Jonathan Soma, a professor in data journalism at Columbia University: https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2024/05/11/this-journalism-professor-made-a-nyc-chatbot-in-minutes-it-actually-worked
When the New York City government released its chatbot, journalists found that "Again and again, the bot messing up on city laws and regulations."
Enter Jonathan Soma, who tried to build his own version of the chatbot. And guess what? He got accurate responses.
💬 Still, he remains cautious: "Chatbots are great for low-stakes things. They are great when something is fun, they are great for a task where you do not need 100 percent accuracy, when you just want a little bit of guidance."
"I think that AI in general is absolutely useful for journalism, and I’ve been teaching machine learning and AI to journalists long before ChatGPT hit the scene. I think it is explicitly chatbots that are probably the most problematic part, because they are so confident in everything that they say."
🤗 I have a particular soft spot for this project, as it uses many Hugging Face tools under the hood. This is precisely the kind of work we want to build with the Journalists on HF community. Join us: https://huggingface.co/JournalistsonHF
📺 I can't recommend enough watching his video serie "Practical AI for Investigative Journalism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5wvtYRYbfA&list=PLewNEVDy7gq1_GPUaL0OQ31QsiHP5ncAQ
— Thanks @BrigitteTousi for the link!
A lot of interesting quotes in this interview in The Markup with Jonathan Soma, a professor in data journalism at Columbia University: https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2024/05/11/this-journalism-professor-made-a-nyc-chatbot-in-minutes-it-actually-worked
When the New York City government released its chatbot, journalists found that "Again and again, the bot messing up on city laws and regulations."
Enter Jonathan Soma, who tried to build his own version of the chatbot. And guess what? He got accurate responses.
💬 Still, he remains cautious: "Chatbots are great for low-stakes things. They are great when something is fun, they are great for a task where you do not need 100 percent accuracy, when you just want a little bit of guidance."
"I think that AI in general is absolutely useful for journalism, and I’ve been teaching machine learning and AI to journalists long before ChatGPT hit the scene. I think it is explicitly chatbots that are probably the most problematic part, because they are so confident in everything that they say."
🤗 I have a particular soft spot for this project, as it uses many Hugging Face tools under the hood. This is precisely the kind of work we want to build with the Journalists on HF community. Join us: https://huggingface.co/JournalistsonHF
📺 I can't recommend enough watching his video serie "Practical AI for Investigative Journalism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5wvtYRYbfA&list=PLewNEVDy7gq1_GPUaL0OQ31QsiHP5ncAQ
— Thanks @BrigitteTousi for the link!