AI In the post pandemic cloud

Speculating on the capability of anything seems like a relatively new concept, seemingly exclusive to AI. Only recently do we ask, “what is it capable of doing?”

Less than ten years ago, President-elect Trump told the former FBI director James Comey, that he wanted to, “lift the cloud on the Russia investigation”; that the probe was hindering the White House’s work and that the cloud was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. In terms of how the cloud could be accessed as a discription in Comey’s testimony in 2017 was fairly nonexistent,

“They took everythig we did,” Trump stated later, before his reelection, “They sold the little sections of wall for five cents on the dollar can you believe it?”

Who were they? And what did they take exactly?

Interpret the cloud, (as described by the FBI Director) as a technological component. Not a poetic metaphor.

But today President Trump leaves less room for interpretation. He himself, in a recent interview with CBS, refers to “an exchange model”.

Bill 238 is one example of this. Referred to as “Trump 2.0”, the bill focuses on AI regulation which enables tech companies to release AI models without disclosing potential risks that involve misinformation, bias and safety vulnerabilities.”

At first glance Bill 238 would probably be more in line with an understanding of Trump 2.0 than AI regulation. If left up to the Nevada Legislature and while it awaits approval, it enacts the “Nevada Studio Infrastructure Jobs and Workforce Training Act”. Once passed it will include $80 million in film tax credits and an additional $400 million invested in Nevada.

KUNR’s Brian Duggan stated, “I think generative AI is relatively new. In the last couple years my experience has been—like everyone else’s at KUNR, encountering it and experimenting with it just to see what it’s capable of doing. But I think in the context of a health emergency like the pandemic? I haven’t read any literature or studies on how AI may be used, (whether it’s vaccines or how to treat COVID) but it seems true to me that AI is increasingly a part of our information ecosystem which presents, of course, many challenges to sift through. What is real and what’s not.”

Duggan went on to say, “I think it’s kind of a broad-based problem that we are all facing as a society. I’m not saying AI is purposely injecting misinformation into our information systems but certainly presents a new reality that we have to contend with as journalists. Since the debut of OpenAI and all the other chatbots that have kind of come out in the last couple of years.” Duggan explains, “We have taken a pretty hardline approach to our reporting and what appears editorially for us, whether it’s on the air or on our website, that no AI can play a role; in that and that everything has to be generated by a person.”

What Duggan described sounded like a type of social media tool which could personalize any and all data within the UNR community and on a full spectrum of community activities. Much like what Bill 238 proposes and AI-driven pharma marketing can’t be ignored as an influencer. Acting within a studio mind-set in order to infulence later generations; a seemingly key feature of the studio infrastucture act. In order to justify it’s $80 million in tax credits, a stuido mind-set plays along.

“You can put the word community on anything,” Reno Generator’s, Asa Kennedy, said, “The word community is arbitrary at this point.” Like most artists from the Reno Generator, he participates in burning man and more pertinently has an existing public mural located at an underpass on Wedekind Road in Reno, Nevada.

The cloud is technically used for document storage however, something like IBM Aspera or RossOverdrive or other content management systems can transform the public mural and other data into “actionable insights”.

Featured in 2023 by Reno News and Review, “marching orders” awaited by Asa and his team of high school students who participated in its rendering.

“Certainly AI is out there, and it’s being used. A good example that our journalists use when it comes to AI is transcribing interviews,” Duggan continued, “AI is really good at taking an audio file and then spitting out an almost good enough, (but not a perfect) script that you can quickly edit. Say it might get names wrong or proper nouns wrong, but it does a pretty good job of getting you a transcript of an interview so it’s easier for you then as the journalist to process it. In my own experience as a general manager, where I’m not really doing editorials, I use AI to create documents.”

Following a similar rhetoric to the President’s exchange model. I asked Duggan specifically about reports on COVID. “In 2020 the pandemic was reported as a medical crisis. Was there a reassignment or a deidentification by news media? The bio data associated with COVID? For instance, a computer virus in place of the biologic?”

“I don’t know,” Duggan answered, “That’s a really interesting question and I don’t know how to answer it. As far as what we do at KUNR, we discuss what we know and we establish that knowledge onto various platforms; whether that’s broadcast, web or social. So yeah, could AI potentially start affecting how people consume information or think about things? AI has a tendency to hallucinate facts.”

How those facts are hallucinated is more critical when AI is used for diagnosis and treatment. For instance, “AI can help diagnose diseases by analyzing medical records, images and other data.”

If that analysis suddenly hallucinates; from a cloud database. It isn’t a realistic option for health care providers even within a high-performance, architectural structure.

Many hospitals now have a (HPA) platform and an environment designed to process complex problems at very high speeds.

When one thinks of exchange models, Sodexo doesn’t come to mind however, the company did make a cameo performance in Fahrenheit 9/11. Renown Regional Medical Center (an affiliate of UNR School of Medicine) has a presence on site as does Sodexo as of 2023. Sodexo’s key areas of service include Sodexo Live! Which provides a division of food and beverage management services for stadiums and venues.

Before the pandemic Sodexo and other outlets had to rely on the events such as of 9/11 to service visceral reactions across platforms; including Renown Regional Medical Center. Bearing in mind that these environments were already highly regulated for the duration of the pandemic. It’s difficult to imagine now what Trump 2.0 regulation will look like in terms of policy.

The same is true for most major airports “The AI boom requires enormous computational power and with that comes skyrocketing electricity demand.”

A commercial airline representative at LaGuardia was not authorized to speak on the record due to company nondisclosure agreements. However, there was verification that Terminal B had been completed during the pandemic. Similar infrastructure was echoed at Denver International Airport where improvements were made. There wasn’t a mad rush to talk on the record regarding anything AI related at either airport. The pandemic was a more accessible topic however, strictly off the record. It was suggested that moving forward, internet access would be the biggest challenge in the post-pandemic cloud. This idea of document storage and whatever data is being computed in place of actual web content.

“I mean you can’t trust it, no,” Duggan concluded when I asked him if he believed the data was reliable, “I think that’s the main lesson in AI right now. I think the best analogy I have is that it’s like autopilot in a plane you still need a pilot there to control it, man the plane, make sure it’s going to do the right things. It helps us do our job just a little bit faster but it still requires pretty intensive human oversight for it to be accurate and useful in our particular context. In journalism.”