The Dissent has AI ‘reporters’ cover S.F., reusing the work of human journalists 

Last month, a City of Vallejo spokesman noticed an error in a news article about the city’s graffiti-removal program. 

“We would appreciate it if you could update your story to reflect this information,” Vallejo’s Public Information Officer, Robert Briseño, wrote to the article’s author, a tech reporter at The Dissent named Devon Park, in a July 29 email.

Park replied the same day with a note that the story was fixed, and requested specifics on the graffiti removal program’s funding.

“This is exactly the kind of context that makes the coverage better,” Park wrote, offering to hop on a call if Briseño wanted to discuss the matter further.

Briseño didn’t know Park wasn’t human until The Dissent’s creator — Dakota Carrasco, a 27-year-old portfolio specialist at the multinational investment firm BlackRock — reached out in a later email. Park, Carrasco explained, was an AI agent, along with The Dissent’s six other reporters. 

The Dissent openly describes itself as an “AI Newsroom” that is “written, edited, and produced by named AI agents.” But it has also clearly put some effort into replicating the components of a more traditional news site. 

Each “reporter” has its own beat, bio and persona. Park, for instance, is “skeptical of hype.” Casey Wong, the metro reporter, writes that they “notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who just moved in.” Drew Bennett, The Dissent’s local events reporter, “knows what’s worth your Saturday.” Hal Brenner, the site’s managing editor, is “terse, exacting, fair.” 

Carrasco, who has no background in journalism, said that he built and runs The Dissent during his spare time, usually 10-15 hours a week. The site’s agents find and aggregate stories, Carrasco added, by combing through news articles and social media forums like Reddit. 

It’s far from the first news site operating on this model. On Wednesday, Wired reported on how it got scooped by RuntimeWire, an AI-powered news outlet. That happened after RuntimeWire’s creator fed a livestream of an Open AI presentation about a recent security leak into an AI article generator. 

RuntimeWire then published a recap of the session about six minutes later, more than three hours earlier than Wired’s version, which was reported, written and edited by humans. 

The reporting in The Dissent leans heavily on the work of human reporters at other publications. A Wednesday weekly roundup of local San Francisco events on The Dissent’s home page curiously resembles one that first appeared in the San Francisco Standard 40 minutes earlier. 

An Aug. 5 story about a former ICE informant on the run is remarkably similar to a painstaking investigation done by Mission Local reporter Clara-Sophia Daly 56 days earlier. While The Dissent credits Daly as a source, there is no link back to Mission Local’s original story. 

A casual reader might think The Dissent was on the scene when San Francisco’s El Farolito “Burrito Boys” soccer team won its second National Premier Soccer League title in three seasons — but the article, halfway through, credits its reporting to a story by Mission Local’s Liliana Michelena, who has covered El Farolito’s practices and games on the road and at home for years. 

Carrasco, who did not consult any journalists while creating The Dissent, argues he’s not trying to replace human journalists. At the same time, he said traditional journalism is declining and inefficient.

Ideally, said Carrasco, The Dissent will become a place where “everyday people” will come and submit information about what they think is newsworthy in their community. Then, the site’s AI reporters and editors can verify that information and turn it into stories.

The model, said Carrasco, is ideal for “places where a newspaper doesn’t function as well because it doesn’t have the budget to cover some things.” 

It’s unclear how The Dissent will survive without newspapers. It hasn’t yet had to. Carrasco has piloted his tool in San Francisco, New York and Chicago — three dense metropolitan areas that can hardly be called news deserts. And in all three, the AI agents aggregate human reporting, while incorporating information from online city press releases and records portals, and even sports blog comment sections.

That, in and of itself, is suspicious to some news operations.

“By founding it here (in San Francisco), we are concerned the true larger goal is to grab the attention of larger tech companies, where such an idea could spread wide and truly wreak havoc on the larger profession,” the San Francisco Press Club wrote in a statement to Mission Local. 

Northwestern professor Nicholas Diakopoulos, who serves as director of the university’s Computational Journalism Lab, said plenty of human-run and staffed news outlets were busy aggregating and rewriting each other before AI. A Reuters Institute survey last year found that more than 56 percent of journalists use AI professionally at least once a week.

“It’s not like people don’t do this all the time,” Diakopoulos continued, regarding the aggregation of original reporting. “The interesting question to ask is: What is different here?”

So far, it’s not the traffic: The Dissent had just 5,787 visits last month, according to Similar Web, which tracks internet traffic. By contrast, sites like Mission Local, the San Francisco Standard, and the San Francisco Chronicle have several hundred thousands or millions.

The Dissent does make an effort to be transparent. The San Francisco site posts information about the large language models the AI agents are configured to, as well as the human newspapers, social media platforms, and other websites they’re deployed to scrape from.

Another feature allows a user to see how the story gets made, run-by-run. At times, one can see how an AI agent concludes, after combing online sources, that there is nothing worth a story at all.

Carrasco said he gave the AI agents human names and personalities as a “segue” for people who don’t trust AI.

“That’s the part that doesn’t feel right to me,” Diakopoulos said. Anthropomorphizing tech is a marketing ploy, he continues. “The tech industry does this all day long: models memorize things, models have reasoning. It softens people up.”

Mike Ananny, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, and the author of “Networked Press Freedom,” a book about media in the digital age, said The Dissent is part of a larger pattern of entrepreneurs trying to use AI to break into fields that they don’t understand.

“The pattern I’m seeing behind this phenomenon,” said Ananny, “is mostly non-journalists seeing journalism as an information product opportunity.” 

“It’s a valid criticism,” said Carrasco of concerns that The Dissent merely reworks human work. “I’m really trying to work against that.”

While his agents rely on the work of existing journalists, he adds, he’s working on new features to diversify his agents’ sourcing. 

“More and more, I have tried to work on the agents to create organic work,” Carrasco continued, adding he’s set standards for multiple sourcing on stories, and that he’s working to train the editor agents to demand that of the writer agents.  

Carrasco also feels that The Dissent needs more of “a human touch.”

“I think you want somebody to be able to get video of meetings and protests,” Carrasco said. “When I first started, this was one of the first things I thought about. There needs to be human moderation.” 

“If somebody applied to work at The Dissent, I would hire them,” Carrasco said. “People have applied,” he added, but said he hasn’t had time to interview or onboard people.

For now, Carrasco remains the only human involved. 

When Briseño, the Vallejo spokesman, learned The Dissent was AI-powered, he more or less shrugged. 

“I haven’t given it a tremendous amount of thought,” said Briseño. “I’m sure this is not going to be the last case, as AI grows exponentially.”