Alan Stock and Kristen Kniep talk about citizen journalism and using as a tool to remove barriers. They discuss how new AI platforms let everyday users build websites and campaign plans without coding. Experts in AI see the coming of automation for many mid-level jobs, in turn making quality human interaction more valuable than ever.
Click to read transcript
And a good morning. Great to be with us on this Thursday morning, 15th day of January, halfway through January, already amazing. Joining us right now in the Vegas at a KX NT live line is Kristin kniep, it is Nevada news and views Thursday. And of course, Kristen does a lot of writing for Nevada news and views. And Kristen, thanks so much for being with us this morning.Kristen Kniep 0:22
I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me again.Alan Stock 0:24
So let us talk about AI. Folks know a little, very little about it, and we’re learning more and more, but you know, it’s becoming more and more apparent that there are a lot of folks who are writing articles and even books through AI. So they’re really having ai do it themselves and and also aspects of journalism. People are so called. Journalists are out there writing, you know, having AI write for them. I’ve got to ask you just real quickly this first, is it right to do that? Is it right to have aI right for you, if you’re supposed to be writing an essay, a thesis, a, you know, an article for a newspaper.Kristen Kniep 1:13
So as far as right and wrong, if you’re in a classroom and your goal there is to learn, learn how to write, I would probably say it’s wrong to use it to do your drafting and things like that for you, because you’re in the class to learn how to do it for yourself. That’s not to say whether or not, once you get out of the classroom, everybody else won’t be using AI already, you know, kind of beating you to the punch that way. When you when you’re going through and drafting it, I think that that is really where AI is stronger in a writing sense, like it can give you a rough draft, you can tell it, you know, maybe like a half written, half baked sentence. So I kind of want to write about this today, and they’ll say, okay, it’ll ask you questions, your position on it, and things like that. So the drafting is great, but it really needs the human to kind of lock it in and make it matter to people.
Alan Stock 2:07
So, I mean, it really does create a situation on a positive note. I guess that anyone can really write a decent article now because of AI,
Kristen Kniep 2:17
yes, absolutely. And I think that you can look at that as a scary thing or a positive thing, depending upon who you are. I mean, everybody- there’s always going to be bad people in the world. People are always going to have their hands on technology that we don’t want them to have their hands on. But the goal is to have more good people in there. The more that the barrier for entry is removed, the less that it becomes a systematic thing where only certain people who have maybe credentials can be heard or listened to, right?
Alan Stock 2:50
And one, I guess, One positive aspect of AI is that it can do instantaneous research for you, which is really important. I mean, I, you know, I’ve seen as I’m try as I look things up and I Google things, sometimes it’ll come up and say, the AI says, and it says it’s AI, and it says AI, research says, and it gives me information, and it’s right there, instantaneous.
Kristen Kniep 3:19
It’s pretty incredible. The only thing that I will say that you want to watch out for is it check its sources, because sometimes it’ll think that it’s right and and the human will catch something that it didn’t catch. So if it gives you the sources, you always want to check and verify that the source actually says what the AI thought it said
Alan Stock 3:38
Absolutely. I agree with that 1,000% and also check for bias too. I would imagine that there are some sources out there that have a particular bias, whether it’s political or religious or philosophical or or whatever it is, but there are people, I’m sure there’s AI out there with with bias, absolutely.
Kristen Kniep 4:00
Yeah. It’s just a computer, not a computer, I should say. But you know, it’s lines of code. It does it based on what it’s told to do. So depending upon who built it, you kind of want to, you want to be careful of that.
Alan Stock 4:13
Yeah, all right, so I’m glad you brought the word code up, because that’s something else I want to talk about. And when people have tried to build a website, you have to know that all the coding stuff, I mean, I don’t understand it myself, but I mean, I can see what you know. If you go to what’s behind a website, you see all these figures and these little digits and everything that you know, I have no idea what they are, but that knows, that’s code building I know, and that much I know, and I have no clue in the world how to do that stuff. But now you’re saying that these courses that you’ve just finished in Florida teaches you how to be able to build these. Sites without knowing coding,
Kristen Kniep 5:03
yes, and this is, this is a huge one. So when it comes to coding, it’s a very exact, exact language. And there are more than one language that you can use, a Python, etc, etc. You would have to know that language, speak it and be able to write it yourself by hand. If one character is off, you have one extra space somewhere where it’s not supposed to be, the whole thing can be broken. It’s very, very exact, and that’s how humans have talked to computers in the past. That’s how we tell them what we want. But with AI now we can talk to it in our language, in English, tell it what we’re looking to create, and then it will go and write the code for us. We get the product without having to know a lick of that language. Wow.
Alan Stock 5:55
Stay with me. I’m going to take a quick break. I want to come on back and talk about that. So if, if you’re interested in developing a website, and you want to know the step, the steps to go through, where, where to go to find this out, stay with us. We’ve got Kristen Kniep joining us from Nevada, news and views, and she’s going to give us a little bit of an idea where you can find this stuff. I know she’s going to walk us through every detail, but she’s going to at least tell us where we can find all of this stuff to build a website. A lot of people who would like to build a website and have no idea don’t understand coding like I don’t, but she’s going to explain a lot more than I can ever explain. So Kristen Kniep joining us in just a moment to talk about how to build a website that’s coming up after we check in with traffic and your fox five, first alert, weather update and a good morning. Great to have you with us on this Thursday morning, January the 15th, and we are talking with Kristen Kniep from Nevada news and views. We want to find out more about Nevada news and views, a great source for information, locally, statewide and nationally. Check it out. Nevada news and views, calm. Nevada news and views, calm, a great place to get information, and I get a lot of mine from there as well. Kristen, thanks for being with us. I appreciate it. We were talking about building a website. Traditionally, people have had to use they had to know that language of all those little dots and dashes and figures that I have no idea what they are to build a website, very confusing, but now you’re saying there’s another way to do it, very easy. How’s that?
Kristen Kniep 7:30
So with AI, the easier way to do it now would be that you go into a service like so for websites, the one that we’ve been experimenting with is lovable. Lovable. You go in there, you tell it in English what you’re trying to build, what you want on the website, and it will produce a product for you and host it for you. You don’t have to know anything about anything, basically, except how to speak English and tell it what you want.
Alan Stock 7:56
So wait a minute. You go to the website and you tell it, I want to build a website that that that talks about I’m running for this office and in this district and everything else, and then I guess you give it the information that of your positions on issues, and then it’ll just build a website for you, and it’ll host it at the same time.
Kristen Kniep 8:20
It absolutely will, yeah,
Alan Stock 8:24
my gosh, amazing. Now, you said something to the effect of, I know your your husband built a campaign plan for a candidate based on certain questions that you put in. So tell me how that worked out.
Kristen Kniep 8:39
So that one we built, that one is an app, so not technically a website, but that one is still a little fuzzy in my head too. So you went, we went into a service called reckless, and built the app. There, we told it what we would be looking for to create a comprehensive campaign plan for a candidate. So I tell it that I want the candidate to answer these questions. I want the name, I want their race. I want their positions on certain big issues. And it answers questions like, you know, like a, like an entry form, basically a yes, no, click, click, which one you agree with most. And then in a matter of minutes, it will produce a campaign plan for you based on its own research about your demographics. It’ll tell you what it thinks your budget should be based on assembly race, Senate race, all of that. It really it goes really in depth, things you would not think about after years.
Alan Stock 9:38
So if you think about running for an office. It’s called replit, R, E, P, L, i, t, replit, and that will give you all that information.
Kristen Kniep 9:48
So that is where we built the app. So replit is just the engine that we were working in the app itself. We’re still trying to fine tune and everything, but once we get it down, we’re. To be launching it. I believe we’re going to be making it available to the public to use to double check with the big man on that. But yeah, once we’ve got it all fine tuned and everything, we’re hoping to make that something that people can have at their at their fingertips without needing to pay for, you know, a traditional campaign manager who’s going to cost, you know, way more than our app will.
Alan Stock 10:24
So let me ask you that you brought that up, you said it was lovable. Was that what it was called,
Kristen Kniep 10:29
so lovable is where we’ve been building websites. Replit is where we’ve been building apps.
Alan Stock 10:34
All right, so if you want to build a website through lovable, does it cost money? And if it does how much?
Kristen Kniep 10:43
I believe you get a certain amount of free credits on there. I do know that we have a paid account, so I don’t know exactly how much you get with the free account, but I believe you can start for free, or at the very least get a free trial, really.
Alan Stock 10:57
So you could build a website for free, at least as a trial, to see what it would look like. And then, if you want to be, I guess, more more sophisticated, you go ahead and and pay more money, it’ll do more things for you.
Kristen Kniep 11:09
And if you, if you make it a paid account, you can even remove their lovable from the URL, so people would not even know that you use lovable to build it,
Alan Stock 11:20
and it hosts that you said, too. How does that work?
Kristen Kniep 11:25
That’s a good question. That’s that’s one of those. I can drive the car, but I don’t know how the engine works, kind of things, but I know that it can host it there. So it would be like electkristenkniep.lovable.com, but if I paid for it and wanted to host it on my own website, I could just make it electKristenkniep.com and the lovable is removed completely, and they think I’m really good at building websites.
Alan Stock 11:50
My gosh, okay, are people and candidates are now. They’re now using these as part of their campaign.
Kristen Kniep 12:00
I think if they are, if they’re paying attention to AI, it’s absolutely something that they would be experimenting with. For sure, we’re experimenting with it for for people that we know and are working with, getting rough drafts of websites up and working with them on what else they need to change.
Alan Stock 12:14
So anyone could actually go into lovable and and create a website for any purpose at all. I mean, you know, whatever it happens to be, I could do it if I want to do it for talk radio or by show or whatever,
Kristen Kniep 12:30
absolutely, if you, if you wanted to make it like a personal Instagram page, you could, if you want to do just post pictures of yourself and your family, whatever you want. You can make it,
Alan Stock 12:41
and you can also have it so it’s available to the general public, or only to a select number of people.
Kristen Kniep 12:48
The you can make it available to the general public, yep,
Alan Stock 12:51
or select group of people, if you just choose to do that,
Kristen Kniep 12:55
I believe. So I think you would probably need the exact URL to find it. That one I’m not 100% sure of if you can make it completely private, but I’m sure that if, if you ask them, they probably could tell you.
Alan Stock 13:10
my gosh, all right, this is all right. What is what’s next with AI? What do you predict is coming next with AI? You know, you got your finger in the pulse. So give us a little bit of an idea.
Kristen Kniep 13:23
So the big thing that we learned, and we’re talking about at this last AI bot summit that we were at, was the implementation of things you’re going to see, basically the removal of the middle level of the workforce. So whereas secretaries and things like that, they’re they’re sending emails, responding to phone calls, AI is going to start doing that for people. Some are predicting that there will be a premium, possibly charged to talk to a human, because the AIs are going to be so prevalent and be able to answer the basic questions so easily. You won’t need to talk to a human unless it’s, you know, one of those outlying instances.
Alan Stock 14:06
Oh my gosh. So, I mean, I understand what you’re saying, because I I’ll call and I want to get some information done, you know, for cable or whatever. And they always, well, how can I help you? You know, and it’s always like an AI type thing, and it takes me a while to get to a human so that’s, that’s what’s going to be the big thing next. This is just fascinating stuff. I’m going to have you back to talk about more as we get deeper into this. We’ve been talking with Kristen knead from Nevada news and views. You want to find out more about Nevada news and views .com, again, a great resource for local, statewide and national news. Really great. Go to Nevada news and views.com. Nevada news and views.com, really, it’s one of the absolute best you’re going to find. Kristen, thank you for taking your time to join us this morning. I appreciate it. Do your best. Talk to. To give out my best to the big guy.
Kristen Kniep 15:01
Okay, absolutely I will thank you again for having me.
