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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Evan Jacoby

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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.

A slew of Medicare Advantage plans are disappearing for next year, leaving seniors in many areas with fewer options. In 193 counties across the country, no plans are offered at all.

Medicare's annual open enrollment period kicked off October 15 and runs until December 7, and seniors enrolled in those privatized Medicare plans that are closing in certain markets should carefully review their options.

Medicare Advantage means private insurers run Medicare for older Americans who choose it over traditional Medicare, where the federal government itself administers the program. More than half of the 70 million Americans in Medicare choose Medicare Advantage. It's popular because it covers services like vision and dental, often with lower premiums than traditional Medicare. It also often folds in the "Part D" drug benefit, simplifying that decision.

But a downside of Medicare Advantage is that companies can pick and choose where they offer plans. If a certain community is not profitable, a company can leave that market. And that has been happening on an increasingly large scale the last three years, according to research published in JAMA.

Who is affected

Big swaths of rural America are losing Medicare Advantage choices and so are some major metro areas.

Last year, 2.9 million seniors were in Medicare Advantage plans that closed up shop, according to JAMA. This year, an analysis of insurance company announcements by An Arm and A Leg podcast, shows at least 2 million people will be affected. Other preliminary estimates range from 3.2 million to 5 million seniors. About 35 million people are enrolled in Medicare Advantage.

According to an analysis of federal data by the health policy research organization KFF, the 193 counties that will have zero Medicare Advantage plans are mostly rural. Last year that number was about 120 counties without a plan offered.

KFF's numbers also show that there will be far fewer plans offered in some metro areas. Dallas, Minneapolis, Seattle, Houston and Portland all have between a quarter and a third fewer Medicare Advantage plans for seniors.

What happens next

If your plan is ending, and you don't choose another, the insurance company will assign you to another Medicare Advantage plan or the government will enroll you in traditional Medicare — but without a supplemental or drug plan.

If you want to switch from Medicare Advantage to traditional Medicare and your plan is ending, you can enroll in a Medicare supplemental plan — also known as Medigap — without the same restrictions that you would normally have. If you have a pre-existing condition that has prevented you from enrolling in Medigap before, that could be good news.

Another wrinkle this year is that insurance companies can cap enrollments on some of the Medicare Advantage plans that they do offer.

Which means: If you wait to sign up, a plan you want might already be full.

The companies are supposed to enroll people on a first-come, first-serve basis — and not cherry-pick customers based on health conditions, age, or demographics.

Another reason not to delay is that with so many people on the hunt for new plans, it may take longer than usual to get help.

How and where to find help

Here are some tips for navigating Medicare open enrollment this year:

• Find out if your plan is still offered: First, check your mail. Medicare Advantage plans that are closing should have sent letters the first week in October. You can also log in to your account on Medicare.gov to check your plan's status for next year.
  
• Try calling your SHIP: There's a State Health Insurance Assistance Program — known as a "SHIP" — in every state to help seniors with Medicare. The name's not easy to remember or particularly descriptive, but it's free, mandated by the federal government, and the staff and volunteers are required to give you unbiased information on all available options. Find your state in the directory at shiphelp.org. Your county may have a specific number that you can find on your state's SHIP website.
  
• Look for local Medicare counseling services: Friends, family, leaders at your place of worship, and the constituent services of your local elected officials may have the scoop on where you can get one-on-one help. The nonprofit Medicare Rights Center also has a national helpline, and a well-organized library of online guides.
  
• Brokers can be helpful, but be savvy: You want a broker who's going to talk with you about all your options — including switching to traditional Medicare and a supplemental plan. Ask if they sell plans from all available insurance carriers. And ask if they answer questions about your plan year-round, because insurance never stops being confusing.
  
• Double check what you see on Medicare.gov: Medicare's Plan Finder allows you to search plans online. But lists of doctors and drugs that are covered can sometimes be wrong. To be safe, double check with your doctor's office or a SHIP counselor, broker, or other Medicare assistor.
  
• Don't share your personal information with services you find online: Be careful where you share your personal information like your phone number. Some online agencies will sell your information, leading to spam calls and potentially even scam artists.
  
• Be mindful of the deadlines: Open enrollment for Medicare runs October 15, 2026 through December 7, 2026. The coverage starts January 1, 2027. If your plan is ending, you qualify for a "special enrollment period" to give you a little more time — until February 28, 2027. (For coverage that starts January 1, 2027, enroll by December 31.)

Emily Pisacreta is the senior producer for An Arm and a Leg, a podcast about the cost of healthcare produced in partnership with KFF Health News and distributed by KUOW, Seattle's NPR member station. 

Copyright 2026 NPR

Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots that the Department of Justice said may belong to noncitizens, according to the Los Angeles County registrar and a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Data shows illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races.

Earlier this month, the federal government targeted Los Angeles County and the California Secretary of State’s office in a lawsuit that aimed to block them from counting the votes of roughly 20,000 people who are “likely” noncitizen voters. A hearing on the case is scheduled for Tuesday.

The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit court of appeals to rule on the lawsuit barring a decision from the district judge assigned to the case. They set a deadline for Saturday.

Now, according to the LA County registrar’s office, at least 18 counties across the state have received similar letters. They have been given a 48 hour deadline to provide identifying information corresponding with ballots that the federal government believes were sent to noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The letter requests that county officials also sequester any ballots where citizenship cannot be verified.

“Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.

The Justice Department is asking counties to send information about the voters it suspects are noncitizens including social security numbers, ID information, a copy of their registration and more.

That information can help the government and state quickly assess each person suspected of illegally registering to vote, said the letter sent to San Bernardino County voting officials. The letter says the government’s list of suspected noncitizen voters includes 1,133 people from the inland Southern California county.

California’s secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar have opposed the federal government’s demands. In legal filings, lawyers for California say the request threatens to delay the certification of the vote and undermine the legitimacy of the November midterms. They have also argued that the federal government’s data is unreliable and that their demands risk disenfranchisement of citizens.

Voting is underway in California, with the state’s more than 23 million registered voters receiving ballots in the mail earlier this month. The state said in legal filings that over 330,000 mail-in ballots have already been counted.

The letters on Friday came on the heels of statewide sweep by federal authorities earlier in the week, where 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

The California State University faculty union is asking its members to authorize a strike, as negotiations with the California State University system remain stalled.

This summer, the California Faculty Association declared an impasse after 16 months of negotiation with the CSU. The union’s president said university officials negotiating with the union have “not been honest agents.”

If a majority of members approve the strike authorization, voting from Oct. 26 through Nov. 19, CFA leadership would be authorized to call a strike.

The union, which represents 29,000 professors and other university employees, is seeking salary increases, changes to faculty workloads and protections related to the use of artificial intelligence.

In recent weeks, CSU has reached tentative agreements with three unions: the Statewide University Police Association, the United Auto Workers Local 4123 and Academic Professionals of California. Together, the agreements cover 14,000 university employees.

The tentative agreements, which must be approved by union members and CSU’s Board of Trustees, include an 8% salary increase over two years, along with one-time raises negotiated by each bargaining unit.

It can be tough to be tall. I am 6 feet, hear me out.

And yes, complaining about being able to see over a crowd may sound silly. But height can be a love-hate relationship for many people, particularly towering women and children who feel like they just don’t fit in.

Well, that’s where a worldwide social club for tall people comes in, but whether it’ll reach its 100th birthday is in question.

Tall Clubs International is an organization spanning more than a dozen states and several countries that offers tall adults a chance to connect and commiserate. The original chapter, founded in Los Angeles in 1938, is called the California Tip Toppers.

To get into the L.A. group, men have to be 6 feet 4 inches or taller, and women have to be at least 6 feet. One of the tallest members of the organization is 7 feet 2 inches, and honestly, I couldn’t help but perk up at the opportunity to feel short for once in my life.

At 13, I was still growing at 5 feet 10, towering over almost every kid in my freshman high school class. One of the first questions people still ask me is whether I played volleyball or basketball, and I’ve learned to laugh at the look they get when I say I preferred theater.

“People see how tall you are, they expect ‘Oh, you're going to be great on the basketball court,’” said Michele Cripps, a 6-foot-1 member of the California Tip Toppers, who joined in 1996. She's married to William Walter Wiseman II, a fellow member. “Well, I'm sorry, white girls can't jump sometimes, and I'm one of them.”

Some of the tall club members are generational, encouraged to join by their parents or older relatives, which has started to pose its own problems as the chapters get older.

What’s the big deal anyways?

William Walter Wiseman II and Michele Cripps at the 2026 Tall Clubs International convention in Hollywood.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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The chapters became a way for tall people to trade practical tips, like which stores sold pants that actually covered your ankles or shoes that didn’t need to be specially made.

“I was always being kidded about my pants being too short or my clothes not fitting correctly,” said Wiseman, who's nearly 6 feet 9 and also wasn’t much of a basketball player. “And as I grew as an adult, people are a little bit afraid to approach people that are tall.”

Wiseman has a good sense of humor about his height, cracking jokes that I’ve added to my arsenal when answering “how’s the weather up there?” But he doesn’t gloss over the pain points either — Wiseman can’t fit into cars or roller coasters, hotel beds are never long enough, and airplanes can be an expensive nightmare.

“It's not just the socialization of being tall, but it's also the physicality of it,” he said. “It's almost a handicap to be tall.”

Members of the Tall Club of Orange County at the 2026 convention.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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Cripps said she was a skinny kid, but she couldn’t help but feel “huge” growing up a head above everyone else, which hurt her young self-esteem and made dating more difficult.

The clubs gave them both a chance to see eye to eye with a room full of people for the first time, and potentially even find a partner. Wiseman’s parents met in the Dayton Altitudians tall club in Ohio, decades before Wiseman and Cripps met through their own California clubs.

“The people that married inside the club stayed married,” said Wiseman, who lives in Torrance with Cripps. “The people that married outside of the club got divorced.”

A Dayton Daily News clipping of William Walter Wiseman II's father measuring tall teens in the Dayton, Ohio area from November 19, 1958. 

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Courtesy William Walter Wiseman II

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Future of the club in question

But now, the California Tip Toppers is having trouble bringing in new, younger members — a recruitment crisis that’s essentially dissolved groups in other areas, Wiseman said.

Members of the California Tip Toppers at the 2026 convention.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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“We're facing the same challenges like all other clubs,” Cripps and Wiseman said, jumping in to finish each other’s thoughts. “Some of it could be generational. Some of it's that since COVID, the clubs have not been quite as active as they used to be. Some people [don’t have] homes to open up anymore … and we're all getting older.”

The club is at a crossroads: Get new members on board or fade away. The couple seems to have made it a mission to rejuvenate the California Tip Toppers, but Cripps was frank when she said they’re not sure how to get more people involved, whether it's fresh events or outreach opportunities.

At the end of the day, they’re hoping the club and the community it fosters can help others learn how to “stand tall” and be proud.

The clubs crown a new Miss Tall International at a formal pageant held during the annual convention. The former Miss Tall Clubs International that were at the 2026 convention from left to right: Susan Hopkins, 2019, from the Tall Club of Orange County, Martine Whitford, 1959, from the Los Angeles Higher Ups, Norma Forrest, 1996, from the Tall Club of Toronto and Mary Eleman, 2022, from the Central Arizona Tall Society.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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Members of the Tall Clubs International convention committee.  From left to right: Barry Umbs from Milwaukee, William Walter Wiseman II from the California Tip Toppers, Jim Nelson from the Paramount Tall Club-Chicago and Michele Cripps from the California Tip Toppers.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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“It’s a challenge, but it’s something that was given to us,” Cripps said. “I say as I've aged, I should have listened to my mother, I should have stood up tall.”

Moms everywhere, mine included, rejoice.

“Everybody wants to be something different than they have,” Cripps continued. “So, try and embrace what you have. Life is too short, and it goes too quick.”