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Switched my mind on using AI for news research after a tough week
I always figured AI tools just scraped headlines and missed the real story. Last Tuesday I was digging into a local water contamination case in Flint. After six hours of hunting through PDF reports I got nowhere. A buddy told me to try feeding the public documents into a free AI summarizer. It pulled out three key dates and a 2015 memo I had completely overlooked. That saved me two days of work and changed my whole view on using these tools for deeper research. Has anyone else found a good use for AI in investigative work?
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maxl9319h ago
Those tools just find patterns, not real context or missing info you'd get from actual reporting.
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felixlane18h ago
Yeah but you gotta train them right or they're useless.
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elliot_roberts16h ago
Felix's right that you gotta set them up proper, but I've been using AI to cross-reference property records for a piece on old oil wells near schools. Had about 200 PDFs of state inspection reports from the 1990s. The tool flagged a 1997 document where a inspector wrote "possible leak noted, did not test" that I missed in three manual reads. Brought it to the city clerk and she admitted they never filed a follow-up. That's not just pattern matching, that's finding a buried lead a human buried bad.
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