Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been asking people we’ve met in the course of our other reporting for The Newsfeed about AI, to get a sense of how they’re interacting with the tools, and hear their concerns and hopes for them. All this week, we’ll be bringing you their answers.
In our first story, we asked: How are you personally using AI?
Story published 09/07/2026
“I'm an arborist and I do a lot of work with trees. So I'll start basic research with AI and then go on and do research on paper, so that’s how I use Claude,” said arborist Daniel Collins.
“Just for, like day to day things. If I need to know what the best like... place to shop for, like a certain piece of clothing. Then I'll go check it out. But it's typically just more to help me make certain life decisions... For school, I use it a lot for research, and that's what sort of my work is into. So I sort of have it help me with, like have an outline and like the best sites and like newspapers to, like, look at for my work,” said student Welela Solomon.
“I try not to. You go online. I don't know how to turn it off. How do you turn it off? I don't want to use it... You type in something in the search bar and the first thing that comes up: AI. So I try to go down to the other spots, but then AI has already done something,” said former Quincy Mayor Patty Martin. “Oh, and on the ring doorbell. Someone's mowing the lawn. There's a person walking by. We never got that (message) before. It was just, you know, there's movement, right? And now. And now it actually tells you what's happening out there. We didn't program it to do that.”
“We encourage it. In fact, we provide tools here at Chelan PUD, we provide Microsoft Copilot and we provide ChatGPT, and we have a policy in place that... the premise of the policy is that an individual still owns the outcome. So you can use it as a tool, but you still are responsible for the outcome. So you don’t end up in a situation where, ‘well, AI did that,’” said Kirk Hudson, General Manager of the Chelan Public Utility District.
Tomorrow, you’ll hear peoples’ thoughts on the environmental impact of AI.
