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How ProPublica Uses AI in Its Investigations
When our reporters prompted a large language model to help identify “woke” themes in a database of grants, AI helped them tell a vital accountability story about science funding and Ted Cruz.
In February, my colleague Ken Schwencke saw a post on the social media network Bluesky about a database released by Sen. Ted Cruz purporting to show more than 3,400 “woke” grants awarded by the National Science Foundation that “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” In 2023, in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, a Local Reporting Network partner, we used AI to help uncover patterns of sexual misconduct among mental health professionals disciplined by Utah’s licensing agency. We used self-hosted open-source AI software to securely transcribe and help classify the material, which enabled reporters to match up related files and to reconstruct the day’s events, showing in painstaking detail how law enforcement’s lack of preparation contributed to delays in confronting the shooter.
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