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Northwestern Arkansas has a new local news site — and it's entirely AI-generated, complete with "AI reporters" and all.
According to Nieman Lab, the digital news website called OkayNWA has been around since it first cropped up as an app last year.
And unlike a lot of AI-generated local news sites, most of which fall under the umbrella of "pink-slime" journalism — automated local news content that's politically biased and often propagandized — OkayNWA isn't shy about its liberal use of AI.
"At OkayNWA," reads the website's About page, "we've embraced the cutting-edge potential of artificial intelligence to redefine how news is sourced, reported, and presented to you."
OkayNWA's self-avowed redefinition of news reporting involves scraping the web for local happenings and publishing them under the bylines of the website's "AI reporters," each of which has a different beat. "Benjamin Business," for example, is the website's "business reporting lead," while "Sammy Streets" is its "chief of street-level reporting."
The website mostly publishes pretty low-stakes stuff, including information about upcoming local events, blurbs about area business openings and closings, and so on.
And according to the site's owner, the avoidance of controversial or otherwise more complex topics is intentional.
"The articles should only be about events and fun and good times," Jay Price, the app developer who launched the site, told Nieman Lab. "I don't want crime or politics, or even city council stuff."
But while it's great to have a resource for finding things like local events, the site's stated mission of redefining news and reporting raises the question: is thisactually news?
And how might a site like this impact the broader — and struggling — world of local reporting?
Price was inspired to start the site after he moved to Bentonville, Arkansas with no connections. "I was trying to figure out what to do here and there was information spread all over the place," the app developer told Nieman Lab, "whether it be Facebook, Instagram, various event aggregator sites and email lists."
But even publishing blurbs about benign events, Price admitted, came with its own challenges.
"I was seeing the bots pick up news as events, and I wasn't sure what to do with it, honestly," Price told Nieman Lab. "Like, a new bar is opening this Friday. Yeah that's an event, but it's also kind of news."
But instead of conducting some on-the-ground interviews with the bar's owner and patrons, the AI takes care of the write-up, leading to questions of what gets lost in that process.
For one, local newspapers are incredibly important. Without them, local governments often aren't being held accountable, fewer people vote, and communities become more polarized.
Thankfully, as Nieman Lab notes, OkayNWA isn't the only newspaper in Bentonville — but as local newsrooms around the country continue to dwindle in size and number, it won't be surprising to see automated outfits resembling OkayNWA crop up to fill those voids.
And to that end, though local news does cover stuff like bar openings and live music events, it also includes hard-hitting reporting about topics like crime, politics, and, yes "city council stuff."
The fact that Price actively avoids publishing actually newsworthy content with his AI seems to speak strongly to the limitations of generative AI when it comes to fully automated news. Reporting is a complex task, and generative AI often gets things wrong.
So while it's great to have a website where people can find information about local events, calling this a "news" site is at best, questionable — and at worst, existentially depressing.
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