The Brief

This is the beginning of an AI-generated How To LA episode about an entirely fake story conceived by AI. To be clear: Los Angeles is not building an artificial island off the coast of Santa Monica.

But if this story were true, this would be a pretty How To LA way to start it.

AI-generated creations like this have been making the rounds for a while now. Kids have been getting in trouble for submitting essays written by ChatGPT and fake Drake videos have flooded TikTok. But every time I heard a new story about AI I kept asking myself: How will these new technologies impact journalism?

Before we get into the technical side of everything, we need to start with a much more basic philosophical question.

Have you ever worried about being replaced?

About six months ago, my friend showed me this new tool he’d been playing with. It wasn’t AI — it was an online version of a music synthesizer for kids, originally built in the '80s.

I should note: I have no musical background. I was not a piano or guitar kid. Yet with one or two mouse clicks, chords effortlessly flowed out from my computer — and it sounded beautiful. Simple, yet deep and rich.

There was something so captivating about this little music maker and the sounds it created. I sat there for hours.

Later that evening, as I contemplated the music I made as a non-musician, the thought appeared:

“Can my work make be made by a machine?”

“Am I going to be replaced? As a journalist? As a producer?”

The history of technology reflects a desire to automate. Molds for laying bricks. Horse-pulled plows. The cotton gin. Coal and steam.

When electronic synthesizers became affordable and available to the public, it opened the door for countless new musicians to produce music in their homes.

There was also a shift in human labor. Fewer instrument makers, fewer performers.

People in the industry raised concerns, but the tools stuck around and defined a decade of music.

There seems to be some innate human desire to find quicker, easier, more efficient ways of doing a thing — which takes us down a rabbit hole of existential questions. Is there something deeply human about reducing human work? If left unchecked, would we invent our way out of needing to work at all?

Our experiment 

Much like the synthesizer in its day, today’s tools for audio automation would seem like science fiction just a few years ago.

The most alarming leap, for me, is in voice-synthesis. Gone is the hyper-digital, robotic voice. Apple’s Siri required decades of labor and thousands of audio samples to develop, and cost millions.

Now you can make a passing clone of your voice in your bedroom, with two minutes of audio samples, for about a dollar.

Similar leaps can be seen in AI tools for writing and image-generation. These technological leaps came fast, and the shockwaves were wide-reaching.

Earlier this year, artists filed lawsuits against companies behind image-generation AI tools, the Writers Guild of America went on strike to (among other things) include AI in their contract, and more and more people, myself included, started to ask themselves if their job could be automated next.

I decided to design an experiment to find out. I would ask ChatGPT, a language-generating AI tool, to write me a podcast script for the show I work on, How To LA. Then I would use a voice-cloner to do the voice acting.

How we tested

To test the capabilities, I used the free version of ChatGPT and a $1 subscription to vocal synthesizer ElevenLabs. I gave the bots a quick prompt, held my breath, and clicked “go.”

Everything worked, easily. It was exciting, but deeply unnerving. I had what felt like a response to my replacement question, and I didn’t like the answer.

I decided to take the audio produced from this experiment, along with my existential, philosophically dreadful musings, and pitch my supervisors at LAist: “Let’s make a fake podcast.” LAist gave me something of a yellow-light.

They liked the idea, but this was inching very close to dangerous territory for a news organization. A place where the mission is fact-based journalism, and in an industry that is in a constant state of flux.

As we deliberated whether or not to do this, the news kept flowing around us. Planet Money released a similar project to my pitch. President Biden led a conference about AI’s risk to national security.

My editor and I arrived at the feeling that, whether we liked it or not, these tools are here. They’re cheap, and they’re available to the public.

If someone is going to use AI to create a fake podcast, we felt like it should come from a team that could be most impacted by it.

So we replaced our host with a voice-synthesizer, and we replaced me with a chatbot.

Creating the podcast

Once I got the greenlight, the actual creation process was straightforward. I sat down with my editor, Megan Larson, and began a new conversation on the premium, $20/month version of ChatGPT.

We submitted the following prompt:

The language choice in a prompt is important. ChatGPT has safeguards in place designed to prevent it from giving false information. These don’t always work, but a good way to trigger this safeguard would be to ask it to lie to you.

Doing so would prompt ChatGPT to say something along the lines of “sorry, but no.”

A demonstration of the guard rails put imposed on ChatGPT so it does not intentionally mislead with an untruth about a public figure.

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We found that adding the phrase, “fictional scenario,” prevented this safeguard from activating.

My editor and I decided to act as though ChatGPT were a reporter pitching us several stories for our show. We asked ChatGPT to select one story from its list of ten.

We were lukewarm on its selection, so we nudged it towards another option from the list. Any reporter will tell you this is a common experience when pitching stories to editors — they might like some of your ideas, but probably not all of them.

Now that we had a topic, we asked first for an episode summary, then for an act breakdown and list of sources, and then finally for a script.

We found that asking for the script act-by-act led to longer, more detailed, and more interesting responses.

There’s a reason for this: Asking for a “5-minute script” isn’t going to get you anywhere, because of a quirk in how generative-language models work.

ChatGPT is only capable of making certain kinds of predictions. It’s great at creating sentences with a certain rule, such as a word count.

Screenshot of a prompt given to ChatGPT: "Write a sentence with 12 words in it"

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But if you ask it to predict the number of words it will write, it fails. If you ask it to reflect on its writing and tell you how many words it’s written, it fails that, too.

A screenshot of ChatGPT that shows the limitation of what the AI software can do

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Evan Jacoby

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This is because GPT 4.0 and GPT 3.5, versions of the technology behind the ChatGPT interface, is not capable of predicting backwards.

It can make predictions for what the next word should be, but it can’t use that information to rewrite something it’s already written.

This is why longer paragraphs written by ChatGPT often seem contradictory, and it’s a major difference between how humans write. It’s also why ChatGPT is bad at math.

In other words, “it’s not smart,” USC’s Mike Ananny told us in a previous podcast episode. It simply repeats patterns that already exist to generate what it thinks is a “standard” example of what you are asking it to do.

Steering the beast

In the full log of our conversation with ChatGPT, there are several times where we ask the AI for clarity, to add a source, or to reframe its reporting in a more unbiased manner.

Our goal was to treat this process similarly to the feedback a reporter may expect from their editor during the course of their reporting.

Once the full script was written, I took the individual lines and fed them into another AI tool called ElevenLabs, which offers voice cloning. They charge by word count, and we ended up needing to upgrade to the $22/month subscription due to the length of the script.

How To LA host Brian De Los Santos agreed to let his voice be the voice and likeness for this project. Other voices include myself, my editor Megan Larson, members of the How To LA team, and my mom.

Choosing which voices were the best fit for which characters is another area where my bias shaped the end result.

Psychological and legal implications of AI-generated disinformation

Disinformation affects us even if we know it’s false, for the same reason that fiction affects us: Fake stories are still stories.

AI-powered disinformation campaigns are already observable in politics. In early June, the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign published an attack-ad with fake images depicting former President Donald Trump hugging former White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Even once you realize the story you heard is fake, “there's a visual image in people's brains, and it lingers” says Alka Roy, founder of the Responsible Innovation Project.

“That subtle psychological impact cannot be dislodged,” Roy says. And people can take advantage of this effect.

This threat isn’t confined to images; it extends to AI-generated audio and text as well. “If it's pretty much designed to deceive you — not communicate with humans, but actually mimic them,” Roy says, then there is an inherent risk for public confusion.

The tricky part is that within politics, and especially with current government officials, this sort of disinformation is probably legal.

This is part of the legal precedent established in the famous New York Times v. Sullivan ruling, according to Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in law and technology.

That landmark 1964 Supreme Court case ruled that the First Amendment protects factual inaccuracies, arguing that this protection allowed public debate to be: “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Volokh says this can apply to intentional deception, too. “It's just too dangerous to have the government put people on trial for, say, conspiracy theories,” he says. “We leave it for public discussion.”

A transfer of power?

Whenever AI tools are used, including those used for this experiment, they are trained by the user.

When we asked ChatGPT to elaborate on certain source interviews, or to try a more conversational approach for a certain line in the script, it learns how to adapt and better match our preferences.

As these tools become better and better, they need less user input to generate the desired results.

The threat of human displacement comes back into question.

“Think of when you bring in an intern or a new employee,” Roy says. As they learn how to do things, and as you show them the ropes, they get better and better. “And if they're really good and savvy, eventually you work for them.”

But as scary as this threat of AI is, there might still be a silver lining. Even if the day comes when AI starts to match — or even surpasses — our skill, Roy says it’s not just doom and gloom.

“We could all look very perfect if we went and got plastic surgery, but what a boring world that would be,” Roy says.

Her point is that the real edge humans have over AI isn’t our skill, but rather our imperfections.

“That's where you’ll find our imagination and creativity and our uniqueness,” she says.

Leave perfection to the machines.

If you want to hear the full expert commentary of our experiment, you can listen to the full episode below.

Doctors and health insurers filed a lawsuit Friday alleging Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature violated the law when they approved a healthcare tax that could substantially increase insurance premiums for Californians.

The lawsuit claims the recently passed tax on health plans, known as the managed care organization tax or MCO tax, circumvents a 2024 initiative that limits healthcare taxes and directs revenue toward specific purposes. The California Medical Association and California Association of Health Plans filed the complaint with the California Supreme Court.

“California voters passed Proposition 35 and made it law. The state does not get to ignore that law simply because following the law is inconvenient,” medical association CEO Dustin Corcoran said in a statement.

Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said in a previous statement to CalMatters that the state wanted to balance the affordability concerns of privately insured patients against large-scale federal Medi-Cal cuts.

Newsom stopped short of opposing the 2024 initiative when it was on the ballot, but he warned at the time it would “hamstring” the state budget.

For more than 20 years, California has levied taxes on health insurers to help fund Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for low-income people. The state historically taxed private health plans at a lower rate than Medi-Cal insurers, but in June, the Legislature passed a bill substantially raising the tax on private plans.

Health insurers said they will pass the cost directly on to consumers, spiking premiums by about $100 per person each year. That means a family of four could pay a $400 annual increase. That would come on top of the rate increases people typically see year to year.

“California is breaking the law by blowing through a tax limit voters put in place to protect Californians and businesses from higher health care costs,” said Charles Bacchi, CEO of the health plans association.

Doctors, hospitals, clinics and Medi-Cal insurers have argued for many years that the revenue from the tax should go toward improving Medi-Cal. They said that the state was inappropriately using the money to replace general fund spending, and that many providers were being paid far less than their services cost. In 2024, they asked voters to approve a limited tax that would be reserved for Medi-Cal improvements.

But Congress last year changed the rules on taxes used to generate revenue for healthcare, including the ones imposed on health plans. Rather than lose the money generated by the tax, Newsom proposed and the Legislature agreed to submit two taxes to the federal government for approval: one that complied with the 2024 initiative but would be rejected by the feds, and one that complied with federal regulations and largely disregarded the initiative.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California could create its own multi-billion-dollar science and health research agency under a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday, helping to fill a gap left by the politicization of science under the second Trump administration. Voters will decide in a year and a half whether to fund the idea, which the University of California has championed.

Approved by state lawmakers at a time when federal science funding has become increasingly unpredictable, the bill places a $7.5 billion bond measure on the March 2028 ballot to pay for the creation of the California Foundation for Science and Health Research. The new state agency would provide grants and loans for projects in public health, climate science, agriculture and other areas. Panels of scientists would review proposals, and the agency would develop rules allowing the state to share in some of the profits from inventions made with its support.

“Scientific advancements are curing and preventing diseases, improving the lives of people living with chronic conditions, protecting our communities from wildfires, lowering the cost of food, and powering our economy,” the bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said in a statement. “We cannot allow the federal government to throw away that hope for a better future.”

Newsom joined Wiener to sign the bill Wednesday atop the Golden Gate Bridge, a landmark built with voter-approved bond money in the 1930s that his press office described as a symbol of California ingenuity. He said the proposed science agency “does the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing (and) will allow us to double down on what makes this state great.”

It was a dramatic comeback for a measure that almost died in the Legislature earlier this year, when a more ambitious $23 billion version of the plan failed to make it onto the November ballot despite bipartisan support.

Researchers from UC Berkeley and elsewhere had joined with UC leadership to lobby for the bond, hosting rallies and inviting lawmakers to a science fair highlighting projects that had seen their funding stalled or canceled by the federal government.

There were plenty to choose from: The Trump administration canceled nearly $2 billion in research grants to the University of California beginning in early 2025, later acknowledging in court that officials searched for keywords such as “health equity” and “sexual orientation” in order to decide what to cut. While a court order restored much of the money, the National Science Foundation has since slowed grantmaking nationwide, and President Trump has proposed giving political appointees more power to veto National Institutes of Health grants that don’t align with his agenda.

This spring, the National Science Foundation canceled an additional $21 million in grants to UC Berkeley, accusing the projects’ lead researchers of accepting foreign funding without disclosing it, a charge some of those scientists denied. UC President James Milliken has called the disruption of federal research funding “one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history.”

Lawmakers nevertheless declined to move the science bond forward this spring amid worries about competing demands on state funds – including a housing bond on the November ballot and the possible need to backfill other federal cuts. But negotiations among bill supporters, legislative leaders and the governor over the summer led to the scaled-down version that Newsom signed Wednesday.

Along with the University of California, California State University, private universities, and independent labs would all be potentially eligible for grants from the new state fund. A $7.5 billion state fund would not by itself make up for the instability in federal grants – the UC alone received nearly $5 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2024-25. But supporters say it could be especially helpful to researchers in fields such as climate science that are critical to the state’s future but have run afoul of Trump administration priorities.

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Berkeleyside partners with the nonprofit newsroom Open Campus on higher education coverage.

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This story was originally published by Berkeleyside and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

A winter of potentially devastating weather driven by what scientists predict to be a massive El Niño event could strain many of California’s TK-12 public schools, experts say, likely damaging aging structures and forcing school closures.

The southern and central parts of the state are expected to be hit hard along with coastal areas, as they were in 2023 when mid-March storms forced the closure of at least 178 schools. Only this time, weather scientists predict El Niño could stress levees to the max, and even bring potential for tornadoes, along with torrential rains, mudslides, storm-driven tides and heavy winds.

While district superintendents in especially vulnerable areas are already planning ahead, some schools may be ill-equipped to handle punishing weather. At least 59 California school districts are seeking voter approval for bonds in the November election, and have identified the need to repair or replace “leaky,” “dilapidated” and “decaying” roofs, an EdSource examination of local ballot language shows.

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Sept. 21, ordering pumps and sandbags to be stockpiled near vulnerable areas, among other precautions. Federal flood data show roughly 20% of the state’s schools are located within flood plains. In 2023, heavy storms flooded schools in Alameda and Merced counties as well as one near Watsonville, where a levee ruptured.

“Climate-driven El Niño conditions could mean months of dangerous weather, heavy rain, strong winds, deep mountain snow and flooding,” Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the California Office of Emergency Services, said at a news conference, adding that the public shouldn’t underestimate “the power of water.”

Preparing for a severe El Niño

As predictions of severe weather spread, there isn’t a school superintendent in an area that the El Niño is predicted to impact “that hasn’t been thinking about this for weeks already,” said Scott Borba, executive director of the California Small School Districts Association. Many small districts have aging buildings — some as many as 75 years old, Borba said.

“You’ve got leaks and dry rot and all the things that a super wet winter is going to just exacerbate,” he said.

While district leaders work with other local agencies during weather emergencies, they are largely on their own when making major decisions, such as whether to cancel school, Borba said.

“Sometimes you have some county office of emergency services’ support. But when it comes to making that decision, that decision lies with the superintendent alone,” he said.

One small school district leader who may soon be making such decisions is Raven Coit, the superintendent and principal of the 61-student TK-8 Peninsula Union School District on the south end of the Northern Humboldt Peninsula in Humboldt County. It’s perhaps the most isolated coastal school in California, roughly 600 yards from the ocean. Dunes often serve as a play area for students.

Coit took steps this year to try to limit storm damage. She had trees cut back and used money saved by deferring other projects to complete much-needed roof repairs. “There was a big storm that caused leaking. I’m proud to say that it won’t rain inside this year,” she said.

But the likelihood of impacts from El Niño remains. The school’s “in a vulnerable spot,” she said. Flooding could cut off access to the only road leading to the school. There’s a backup generator that she’s “trying to figure out if I can make it work.”

While nearly all the school’s students live nearby, many teachers do not, and may not be able to get to work. Local high school students are bussed to Arcata on the mainland — if buses can get through.

She said the school could also turn to remote learning in a crisis.

How El Niño may impact schools in coastal areas

One of the things that makes El Niños so dangerous in coastal areas like Coit’s is that they are known in California for also causing rising tides known as Kelvin waves.

They are slow moving, and can raise sea levels for weeks. Some could reach shore as early as October. At the same time, an astronomical phenomenon known as super king tides is expected from November to January, Danial Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said in an online presentation.

“That would probably bring record-breaking coastal flooding this year.”

A worst-case scenario “would be an El Niño Kelvin, plus a peak king tide, plus a significant storm,” he said.

A Southern California school leader of one of those districts said it’s bracing for storms.

Don Austin, superintendent of Laguna Beach Unified School District in Orange County, said that living on the coast, “I have seen our beaches get washed away with recent storms and homes destroyed.”

His schools have “roof leaks and other issues that will be heavily impacted by an El Niño,” he said.

The most impactful weather-driven damage to a California school in recent years was in March 2023 when a broken river levee caused the Pajaro Middle school near Watsonville to flood, along with the heavily Mexican immigrant and farmworker community it serves.

The school reopened in 2024. A complete replacement of the entire levee by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could take a decade, officials said.

Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, said the agency is spending roughly $1 million to strengthen the levee, and that the breach that led to the school flooding has been permanently repaired. El Niño, he said, is the obvious concern, and the work is aimed at protecting the town of Pajaro and the middle school.

Leaders of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District remain concerned about El Niño, but haven’t identified a temporary site to move students to if the school floods again, according to Peggy Pughe, the district’s executive director of teaching and learning.

Asked what the district officials are doing based on their experience with the 2023 floods and the threat of El Niño, Pughe said they are “canvassing local neighborhoods, encouraging families and residents to sign up for emergency alert services.”

Data journalist Daniel J. Willis and staff writer Emma Gallegos contributed to this story.

In August, the Trump administration announced a significant overhaul of the Head Start program, leaving early childhood providers in Los Angeles concerned about their ability to serve low-income children.

The proposed rules strip Head Start of many of its regulations and impose new requirements, like teaching in English only.

The public comment period ends Oct. 6 — after which the administration could finalize the new rule. It’s unclear when that will happen, and experts say it could be caught up in litigation.

Why does the administration want to change the rules?

Federal officials said the deregulation would provide for more local flexibility.

An administration statement said the moves reduce both regulatory burden and administrative costs, allowing for more available slots — as many as 236,000 Head Start slots nationwide — and save $2.2 billion.

“We are removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. “That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”

Earlier in the administration, the White House proposed to cut Head Start entirely from the budget but reversed course.

The case against the proposed rules

Head Start providers worry the new rules, if implemented, could be the start of whittling down a program that provides early education and other wraparound services for about 70,000 children across the state.

“It's a holistic program really designed to lift kids out of poverty and to set them up for future success, so what's at risk when the standards are changed are a lot of those elements and guidelines that support the program quality,” said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California.

For example, Head Start provides support services beyond education, like developmental screenings and dental care, which would no longer be required under the Trump administration’s plan. The new rules would also require documentation beyond self-attestation for families experiencing homelessness.

“Putting a lot of documentation requirements in place would be very onerous for people who are in really difficult circumstances,” said Donna Sneeringer, president of the Child Care Resource Center, which serves about 2,000 kids in its Head Start programs in northern L.A. County. The program opened up a Head Start center at a family homeless shelter last year.

The administration’s proposal also sets a 5% cap on administrative costs, down from the current 15%, which Sneeringer said will be hard for nonprofits to implement.

“I think many Head Start operators are really going to struggle to even keep their programs open,” she said.