Community journalists, technologists and civic leaders gathered in Astoria on Sunday for Epicenter NYC’s AI community summit, “Let’s talk about AI,” to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping local news, civic engagement and everyday life.
Speakers explored both the opportunities and risks presented by AI, from newsroom innovation and small-business growth to scams, misinformation and job displacement. A recurring theme: communities should have a voice in how AI is developed, deployed and governed.
“We aren’t trying to stop the future,” said Sonny Messiah Jiles, CEO and publisher of the Defender Media Group in Houston. “We’re trying to make sure our people are written into it.”
Protecting yourself from AI scams and privacy issues
As AI tools become more sophisticated, speakers warned that scams are becoming harder to detect.
One of the organizations facilitating, All Star Code, a nonprofit working to develop the next generation of tech professionals from underserved communities, led a workshop on best prevention practices. All Star Code executive director Danny Rojas stressed how AI-generated voices can be used to impersonate family members and create a false sense of urgency. To protect themselves from these kinds of scams, Rojas shared, that people should verify requests through another channel, create family code words and ask questions only the real person would know how to answer.
They also shared the PAUSE framework:
Purpose: Why was this message sent?
Author: Who created it?
Urgency: Is someone pressuring you to act immediately?
Source Check: Can you verify where it came from?
Evidence: What proof supports the claim?
The goal, All Star Code presenters said, is not to become an AI expert but to pause and think critically before reacting.
Community media applications of AI
The conversation centered not on whether AI should be used but how it can be used responsibly. “This is a moment where I think both democracy and the media in particular are at a decision point: AI is here. It’s not going anywhere,” said the summit’s keynote speaker Anthony Shorris, a partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
“It is kind of a moment when a door is opening and is letting the future in,” added Shorris, who is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Messiah-Jiles said AI is not only changing the rules of the game but also creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs and small organizations by giving them access to tools and capabilities that were once available only to larger institutions.
Her peers, part of Epicenter’s AI civics and media collaborative, echoed that message with demonstrations of their own.
Pat Davis, founder and publisher of nm.news, shared how his newsroom built a custom AI assistant trained on editorial standards and archives to help reporters transform written stories into short-form video content. Some timely videos, including one tied to developments in the Jeffrey Epstein case, drew significant engagement from audiences who did not yet follow the newsroom’s platforms.
The goal, Davis said, is not to replace journalists but to help small teams with limited resources grow and reach audiences across multiple platforms.
Julia Moak, publisher of Greenpointers, a hyperlocal publication covering North Brooklyn, showcased the publication’s use of AI to analyze hundreds of pages of community board meeting minutes and identify overlooked story leads. The AI tool categorizes findings into what she calls a local “signal” system that helps the editorial team determine which local issues to pursue.
Like Davis, she emphasized that each story still goes through a traditional reporting and editing process. By sifting through large amounts of information and flagging patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed, Moak said, AI simply helps reporters get the data and get up to speed faster. In one case, Moak’s team used AI to examine data from numerous board meetings and uncover patterns in safety concerns raised by single women in North Brooklyn.
This kind of system, Moak said, “helps increase civic engagement and move us from being reactive journalism to predictive news.” She contrasted traditional local news, where typically articles are published soon after editorial decisions are made, with a newsroom spotting emerging issues and working with the community to inform those decisions.
“This is just the beginning,” Moak said, adding that the newsroom could apply the same framework to public data sets such as 311 complaints, buildings and transit data. “To ultimately create a global signal system that can surface changes early and really empower our communities to engage in civics better.”
Exploring AI’s creative possibilities
Gabo Arora, lab director at the Museum of the Moving Image and a filmmaker and creative technologist, demonstrated how AI can place a contemporary person into archival documentary footage and generate a voiceover. A young Black woman appeared in historic civil rights scenes alongside figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
The technology, Arora said, raises important questions about whether AI can help audiences resonate more deeply with history and bring historical narratives closer to our lived reality.
“This is art, it’s a hypothesis,” Arora said. “The hypothesis was: do we feel closer to history when you can speak some of these words, embody history and see yourself there, hear yourself? Does that connect you to Malcolm X’s speech?”
Balancing risks and opportunities
Despite the benefits of AI tools, Messiah-Jiles said concerns about AI-driven job displacement are becoming increasingly common, particularly among younger workers.
“I’m running into college graduates who are scared shitless, like ‘AI is taking my job,’” said Messiah-Jiles, who mentors young people across various industries.
When mentees raise those concerns, she often throws back questions of her own: What are they doing to adapt to the changes wrought by AI? How are they accounting for AI systems that screen job applications and may filter them out before they can even dazzle potential employers in an interview?
The discussion also addressed growing concerns about privacy, online safety and economic inequality. Tazin Khan, founder and CEO of Cyber Collective, a nonprofit that offers free resources to communities impacted by online harm, spoke about the challenges of raising awareness around data privacy and digital rights.
“I’ve been screaming into glass walls for, it feels like, forever,” Khan said, reflecting on years of advocacy work. Khan said conversations about privacy, surveillance and online harm often feel abstract until people understand how those issues affect their daily lives.
To help individuals better understand the stakes, she said, you can start as simply as saying: “That’s our money that’s being taken from us.”
