Proposing the Saratoga AI Alliance
At a time when journalism is more important and more
threatened than ever, machine learning enables us to
reimagine the way communities stay informed.
AI empowers us to transcribe interviews with remarkable substance and speed, creating stories with expert content from dozens of sources, and generating magazine-length profiles and features in seconds.
We started our careers on manual typewriters. A half-century later, we’re still hammering out stories on keyboards, but we’re staring into screens that bring us into a world that has gone totally digital and, more than that, is populated by what some experts are now comparing to an “invasive species.”
We have no idea whether we can influence the direction in which AI goes. Our goal is to understand and do the most constructive things we can with it.
We’re putting it to work in supporting Civic Conversations facilitated by AI but supervised and directed by humans at each step in the process. All experts we host in Zoom panels are asked to review and improve in any way they wish the interviews we are collaborating with them in writing.
With the Warren County Department of Planning and Community Development, we’re hosting conversations with historians and those who make their living on the land in the Upper Hudson corridor, spotlighting great places to visit in the 40-mile stretch between Lake Luzerne and North Creek, and creating GPS-triggered audio tours to help you explore this rugged but beautiful terrain.
In collaboration with AI and Faith, we’re supporting the AI conversation nationally in churches, synagogs, mosques, and temples with the platform we’ve named AI and the Human.
AI offers incredible potential to augment our lives, but it also threatens to destabilize institutions and social norms. It raises urgent questions about privacy, equity, accountability, and the nature of work and identity.
That’s why we’re proposing the Saratoga AI Alliance.
Since launching ProfNet in the early 1990s, Dan Forbush has had a long-standing interest in the power of collaborative media. Starting his career in academic public relations at Union College in 1975, he has served as the senior communications officer at Syracuse University, and Stony Brook University, and Skidmore College, which he left in 2015 to develop collaborations in Smartacus.
With five decades of experience in higher education marketing and strategic communications, Bill Walker has led communications programs at Rutgers University, Dartmouth College Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Arizona, and the College of William & Mary. He served as Skidmore’s communications chief from 1978 through 1985.
