Civic applications of generative AI

A user applied Fable, a generative AI tool, to scrape and analyze transcripts of local school board meetings, finding that the latest AI models accurately handle complex civic information and enable new levels of public understanding of local politics.

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: 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: For a computer system to get some stuff like this right occasionally is, at least in 2026, not new. That level of quality and consistency would also be nowhere near good enough to get actually useful outputs in this project, which required the system to get tons of stuff like that correct, with a very high accuracy rate. It doesn't take many misconceptions, translation errors, or straight-up mistakes in a project like this to make its results useless or worse. Local politics can be tough to understand in a way that often reminds me of security through obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security through obscurity . Even when people want to communicate with you, the terms in which they're speaking are often only semi-familiar at best . The aggregation of all the essential contextual information is so often just a bit too much for a layperson to keep in mind, especially if they can't constantly interrupt to ask clarifying questions. I try to stay informed, but sometimes need reminders of, e.g., what precisely the different tiers are https://www.mass.gov/doc/the-massachusetts-tiered-system-of-support-tiered-instruction-2/download in the Massachusetts system of educational support, and you can't really understand some of these arguments if you don't know what's going on with the tiers and state policy. Again, this is just one of many fragments of context. The newest models, though, are very accurate, very good at getting through drudgery, and still infinitely patient with my questions. There's a large set of civic questions that are now practically accessible to me in a whole new way. And this generalizes beyond local politics. A tax override recently failed. Drama has ensued along many dimensions. ↩ https://www.natemeyvis.com/feed/ fnref-1