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→ How the New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere”

The New York Times has developed a tool to download, transcribe, and summarise various right-wing podcasts, part of what they call the “manosphere”, in order to spot signs of division and discontent within Donald Trump’s base:

“When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. Currently, the tool is used by nearly 40 reporters across the newsroom.”

It’s a fascinating use of LLMs in the newsroom. Whether this ends up making bias worse, as the apparent consensus of grifters and racists becomes a signal that influences the Times’ own reporting, is a complicated but vital question. But this specific use-case is just one of many. The tool grew out of another, called Cheatsheet, which sounds essentially like a no-code tool that allows journalists to execute LLM-based workflows against custom data, and which has already led to significant investigative breakthroughs:

“The Initiatives Team started trialing other applications of LLMs to process large, messy datasets and file dumps on a case-by-case basis. Today, many of those live in a single spreadsheet-based tool. Reporters can drop datasets into Cheatsheet and then run different preset scripts and prompts. Each capability in the menu is known as a ‘recipe.’ Some of those recipes, like transcribing thousands of hours of video footage and summarizing transcriptions, are foundational to the Manosphere Report.

“Still in its beta, Cheatsheet has already been tested on about 300 users in the newsroom, with 50 of those being ‘really active users’, according to Seward. Right now, at least one new project is created in Cheatsheet every day. The tool has been used to investigate an election-interference group, to transcribe and translate Syrian prison records, and to find recent instances of Trump talking about Jan. 6. At times, Cheatsheet has even been used to take on more thorough historical analysis of podcasts.”