Civic applications of generative AI

Recently I pointed Fable at my town's Web site and asked it to scrape transcripts of recent school board meetings, answer some questions I had about them, and preserve those transcripts as a stable artifact (so I can keep adding to, and asking about, this record). The experience was striking in a few ways. From less to more surprising: Fable gave me reasonable-looking results with minimal hassle. Those results are, as far as I can tell (including cross-checking and follow-up questioning), extremely accurate and useful. The differences between the best models and even slightly outdated ones are very important in this kind of project. Specifically, here are things that Fable did that seemed to me much better than the results I would have gotten a month or two ago: It found the relevant subset of archived videos without asking a lot of questions or complaining about inconsistent URL formatting. It cleaned up errors in automated transcripts. It handled proper names quite well, including…