AI Just Changed Saratoga Springs City Politics Forever
Saratoga Civic Pulse, a new audio Substack by Saratogian Larry Toole, distills marathon City meetings into short and sweet podcast-style summaries for mass consumption.
As a general rule, Saratoga Living tends to stay away from politics, both of the national and local variety. (Of course when the topic of paid parking comes up, all bets are off.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to be informed about what’s going on in the city. Decisions made in City Hall affect the daily lives of all Saratoga residents, and it’s SLAH’s mission to report on those daily lives.
Of course, wanting to be informed and actually attending City meetings are two different things. I know from experience just how long City Council meetings can drag on, and how dry some of the topics covered in planning board meetings can be. It’s hard to carve out time to go to these meetings—or even to watch the live streams of them that are posted online.
But not having the time to stay informed is no longer an excuse, thanks to Saratoga Civic Pulse, an experimental, AI-powered audio Substack that distills multiple-hour-long city government meetings into easily digestible mini podcast episodes.
The new initiative is the brainchild of 25-year Saratoga resident Larry Toole, who has spent three decades doing government consulting in the IT space. (Unrelated fun fact: Larry’s also the president of the Saratoga Stryders running club.)
“I’ve been following all the developments in AI and started seeing ways in which these large language models can summarize information so effectively,” he says. “Then I got interested in, if you can do summaries, what about putting it in a podcast format so that it can be very accessible—short, but meaningful enough that people get the relevant information.”
While he was watching AI develop, Larry was also keeping up with local happenings by way of City Council, planning board and design review board meetings. He found that while there is definitely a core group of Saratogians who pay a lot of attention to local politics, that group is relatively small. In other words, there is probably a much larger group of residents for whom the inconvenience of attending City meetings is preventing them from becoming informed citizens.
And thus, Saratoga Civic Pulse was born. Larry developed a software that feeds a video of a City meeting, or the meeting minutes, into a large language model. Through prompting, he asks that the content be condensed and summarized to create a script that’s modeled after a two-way conversation between people (like a podcast). That script is then fed to a text-to-speech service, which actually allows you to choose the voices that are used. (Currently, if you listen to any of Saratoga Civic Pulse’s meeting summaries, you’ll be listening to AI host Jessica and a clone of Larry’s own voice.) And voila—a three-hour City Council meeting summarized in a sub–10 minute podcast-style audio recording. The entire process takes between four and five minutes.
By publishing these audio summaries on Substack, Larry is able to send each one directly to subscribers’ emails. Non-subscribers can also listen by visiting saratogacivicpulse.substack.com; it works exactly the same way Saratoga Living After Hours does, just with audio.
As with any new AI technology, there are certainly concerns. “I’m really trying to make sure it’s nonpartisan,” Larry says. “I just want to present the facts and make sure that the AI is not biased. That’s an area that we’re going to have to keep tweaking so that the models don’t get biased if, say, there are a lot of people going to a planning board meeting who are against a certain project. That information should be presented, but certain adjectives shouldn’t be used to slant the view one way or another. Let people draw their own inferences from the information that’s provided.”
And while Larry is attempting to use AI for good, he’s hyperconscious of the ways in which bad actors could potentially use a similar software to undermine the democratic process. “This use case to me is one of the real positives of AI,” he says, “but I could just as easily say, ‘create a podcast of this meeting that has this slant to it,’ and it would get out and people would then assume that that was reality. We have examples all over the place where that’s happening right now.”
Despite the risks it poses, the world seems to be going full-steam-ahead on AI. “The train has left the station on this,” Larry says. “Hopefully there will be some good regulation by various government entities, but that hasn’t happened yet. And hopefully the good use cases are going to outweigh the bad, but the verdict’s still out on that.”
And if this article was too long for you to actually read, maybe you’ll be able to listen to an AI audio summary of it sometime soon.
—Natalie