AI enters Northwest Arkansas' local news and party scene
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Jay Price, creator of OkayNWA.com. Photo: Worth Sparkman/Axios
Jay Price could make your worst nightmares come true. Think robot revolution and AI overlords.
- Fortunately, he's super affable and talks with the joy of a kid at Christmas. He's not likely to flip on Terminator's SkyNet.
Why it matters: Price, who runs NWA Apps as his full-time job, uses "bots" to scrape the internet, then create artificial intelligence-generated content for a local news site (OkayNWA.com) and an events-calendar app (OkayNWA).
Each entry is accompanied by a piece of AI-generated art as a visual representation.
State of play: Price launched the app about a year ago as a try at resolving a common gripe among NWA newbies and younger people looking to socialize. "Nobody had built an app to tell you what was going on," he said.
- But, "I would get events … [from the bots, and] sometimes events are news and sometimes news are events," Price said, using an example of a new-beer release at a local bar, saying it's, "like an event, but it's more news."
Between the lines: As an afterthought, he created the news site, mostly to see if he could and to play with various technologies.
- Items the software deems as news get sent to the virtual newsroom, where one of eight beat-reporter bots creates a story.
- Benjamin Business covered pickleball and downtown Rogers development; Eva Eventful covered craft beer and Razorback basketball; Arlo Artiste, the arts.
- It has ended up being real-world marketing for his bread-and-butter business, Price said.
Threat level: Watchdog NewsGuard has identified more than 1,000 unreliable, AI-generated news websites globally that seed misinformation, and dark money is behind partisan sites masquerading as unbiased news — especially in election swing states.
- Reality check: Price makes it clear on the news site that stories are AI-generated. He isn't trying to pass it off as uniquely human-generated content and he steers clear of heavy content, keeping it lighthearted.
Backstory: Price is the quintessential resident NWA is trying to attract. During the pandemic, he packed a guitar and clothes and left his home in Cleveland.
- He spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic on the road, doing contract software development from Airbnbs in Maine, Florida and Texas.
- As he was leaving Fort Worth, Texas, a couple of years ago, he turned east rather than west, thinking of a short visit to Cleveland. "I was going from Tulsa to St Louis; I was like, 'Well, let me check out this Ozarks place. They got that show about it,'" he said, referring to "Ozark."
- After seeing the area's mountain bike trails, plus all it had to offer for business and quality of life, he decided to come back and stay — at least for now.
What's next: The app has about 5,000 daily users, Price said. He's weighing options about how to monetize OkayNWA but hasn't settled on a route.
- "Once you start taking checks from people, it changes the game," he said.