ROSWELL, Ga. — When James Dillard created Recap Roswell, a website that breaks Roswell City Council meetings into digestible chunks, he drew from his time living in Switzerland as inspiration.
“Switzerland is a very high trust society with a very high degree of civic participation,” he said. “When you’re living abroad, you see your home differently, and that caused me to place a greater value on participating, in making the system work.”
Dillard also said Robert Putnam’s nonfiction book “Bowling Alone” was an influence. Putnam writes about the decline of social capital, how society is becoming less participatory, even in smaller institutions like social clubs.
Dillard is not alone. Other innovators are developing tools to help keep citizens engaged in government.
“I feel like Roswell, Georgia, the United States would be healthier if we have more of those institutions, or micro institutions, where people are connecting and going through the process of deciding what they think they should do together and then, trying to make that happen in the real world,” Dillard said.
In May, Dillard built Recap Roswell from scratch using ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by the nonprofit organization OpenAI.
For each post, he creates a transcript from the video recording of the latest council meeting. Then, he runs the transcript through the OpenAI API, based on a chain of different requests which synthesizes it down to a quick summary.
“You now are taking hundreds of hours of time and condensing it to something that someone, like yourself, can get through in 15 or 20 minutes,” Dillard said.
But, using AI is not without its pitfalls. He has to check the summary for “hallucinations,” or errors presented as fact.
“I don’t want to minimize the chance that I invent a decision by the City Council,” Dillard…
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