Alaska News • • 57 min
MISC-20260505-1000
video • Alaska News
That we also use that. We'll look at that, you know, to try to see words that are things we can't hear or to pull in the— to pull it in and then we have to clean— we have to do a lot of cleanup. You know, it doesn't do it for us, but it's just a way to kind of verify what we're— troubles that we're having. Okay. That's kind of how we use it.
Do you want to talk about yours? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] We're not officially using any yet.
I've got twice the staff as Senate Records, and only a few years ago I had a new staffer who I just found out was using to do his minutes. And one of the biggest concerns is someone, especially when they're new, not really understanding the process or some of the discussion maybe, or just trusting that AI is getting it right without going back to to make sure that you're listening and doing the work that you're hired to do.
I think it can be a good tool, but I'm, I'm just trying to suss out in what way and with what restrictions. I'm not— haven't figured quite anything out. I do have a staffer this year who, who on his own time has been trying to figure out ways to create some kind of a macro that then— and I don't know all the terminology, but kind of write all the things that we look for when we edit and maybe creating something that they can hand off to Jessie and ask her to do a macro for us because I've had some issues with having to take too much time editing and it's taking away from other things. And so I think I'm more leaning towards supporting that kind of use of AI for editing rather than actually writing the minutes at this point because I think the—. Our—.
Yeah, I think I said everything already about that. Okay.
I can get back to you on— I mean, I've talked to Tim before and you've been— let me know if there's anything, but we're not quite there yet. And I also have reached out just once with all the secretaries' offices to see what the interest is, and I think the conversation should be ongoing perhaps. So we're kind of all on board with things. Not that we all have to do everything the same, but just kind of have a sense of where we're going with it.
I think we had discussed that as a group 2 years ago and decided there wasn't consensus, so we weren't going to move forward with it. Yes, yes.
And I am assuming that, uh, IT is a Are you IT? I always still call you IT. Yeah. I'm sorry. Is aware of what Will Muldoon is doing at the current moment?
We are aware of what—. And I've read through a bit of that, and I hope that the legislature wouldn't go that way because it does not read— it is very difficult, I believe, for a public person to distill what's happened. There are a fair amount of errors. We do work in a unique environment with language that you have to learn and acronyms out the wazoo that you have to— and then they get changed. We use one for 20 years and then suddenly we're doing something different.
So I'm glad that you all know about that. I've been looking at that. You know, he, he is a busy person scraping through our records and some of the things I'm curious why, because our system already offers a fair amount of that information that he is. He's just putting it in some different format and yay for him if he wants to do that, I guess. But, um, I, you know, I guess I hope someone follows him consist more consistently than I do.
I just, periodically see what pops up in certain feeds that I check to kind of get the pulse of the legislature. And that one of going through the audio and the minutes and stuff was very surprising. And so I'm glad that people know about it, and I forwarded it to the records offices to make sure they were aware of it.
Yeah, yeah. We are aware that he's working with our data and providing resources to the community.
We don't know how to respond at the moment, but that's one of the things we're thinking is just how to provide useful tools. But we really need to err on the side of accuracy, which AI doesn't always provide. Provide. So, but— And our rules in terms of what is the official record that will be looked at. It won't be looked, you know, going to court, it's not going to— well, I shouldn't say not, but I would hope that we stick to what we have in the past, and that's our official records of our documentation.
Yeah. And just to add to that, I don't know if IT provided Will Muldoon any access that is not available to the general public, but he is putting this out on X and saying it's better than BASIS. I did see that tagline, better than— I took it personally, but I wasn't going to bring it up here. It's important if people are stating things publicly, let's put it on the record. But we He doesn't have extra access, but we have taught him where to search for the data, and then he does various work on it to provide different insights that, as you mentioned, can be helpful or not.
That's all really good comments. Does anybody have any more? Thoughts on AI? I was just wondering, probably Tim knows, how long it takes for the transcript, for the ADA transcript to come up and be available for people to look at?
Gotcha. I think we were referring to the closed caption transcripts that come out of Vimeo. Those, as soon as the video's done, done being broadcast live, there's a slight processing that happens on Vimeo, and I believe it's within usually 10 or 15 minutes as soon as the finished video is posted to the Vimeo account, that transcript is available. Shea has been harvesting those transcript files and storing them. We haven't been doing anything with them, but we are grabbing those off of each video.
So if they could be of use to your offices in the future, it is the verbatim captions transcript as the AI captioning thinks things were said. So it'll be ripe with errors, it'll need some correction, but it may be useful for you.
Okay. Well, yeah, as Laurie said, I'm just trying to suss out what tools are useful and how. So this was a good conversation, and if you think of anything after this meeting, In regards to AI, we're trying to figure out how to encompass AI in the 4-year plan that we present to Ledge Council, because I think it missing would be a glaring oversight. But putting it in, we're a little lost as to how to incorporate it in that 4-year plan, because we are still formulating our AI plan. Will we return as a group to this subject before you present to Ledge Counsel?
I would like to bring them the 4-year plan to this group before going to Ledge Counsel so that I can get your feedback and incorporate that. So, so the answer to that is I really want to. I— the only reason I'm not promising absolutely is because of of the way meetings work out and getting this group together, but I am pretty sure that we will meet and discuss the lawyer plan. If we were to give you feedback, what is your deadline for getting to Ledge Counsel? It's not scheduled yet, so I don't have a deadline.
Okay, maybe let us know, and if there's more feedback, we can give give you. We'll try to get it to you before then, whether or not we meet. Okay.
Okay. Well, I see that we have reached the end of our agenda. I will open the committee for other business. Anything else anybody wants.
Comment on before we adjourn? [Speaker:DR. GAIL WYATT] I do.
This is about posting to BASIS, and I'm wondering, or something for you to think about, is that you increase the limit of the size of a document that we can post because it's getting really hard to reduce. The reducer that's built into, you know, Adobe hardly reduces it, and then I was told to convert it all to Word and then convert it back to PDF, and some of that turns it into gobbledygook, and it's just really getting— and then I used up all the free reducing on Google. I'm not going to pay for it, so it's just something that's been a problem. I love PDF.com.
Oh, okay. Well, I'm thinking that—. Is that the full URL? Ilovepdf.com? Well, I'm thinking maybe that within our own system we should have some kind of fix.
I will consider increasing it. It is something that we have two kind of competing problems with that. We do have a lot of people that get one-page documents that are 200 megs and they try to post it and it's— and the system rightly rejects that. But we get a lot of long documents that are a reasonable size and we're trying to have a technological solution that handles it both.
And it may need to be a more complex technological solution that looks at the page count and if people are posting ridiculously oversized, over-resolutioned pictures.
But right now it's just a simple one that looks at just the file size and rejects it based on that. And most times we encounter it, about 90% of the time we encounter it, people can reduce it. And that's what I'd recommend, but it is getting to a day and age that we could probably add a little bit of space to that. I just, I do worry about just increasing it, the amount of shenanigans that happen when we do things like that.
A lot of mine is big, a lot of public testimony, so it's mostly written word. Yeah, and written word should be fairly compressible. So, but yes, I myself have also fought against the PDF size reducer, which used to be a lot better. It used to just reduce it easy, and now it doesn't anymore. So I'm not sure if it's the Adobe PDF itself or the way PDFs are authored that's changed.
Would you reduce the file size before doing the accessibility check or after?
After. The accessibility check should be the last thing. So there's not an immediate solution. [Speaker:JOHN_MUELLER] I will look at it. And I think that we can increase at least a little bump to that file size limit, because people do hit it reasonably often.
So I will consider it, Helen. And if I do, I'll communicate that to people.
So just quickly, you reminded me the ADA. So does this give a little bit of wiggle room for you all with the extension of the deadline? Or where are we at with that? Yeah, so we're going to continue to work. We did go to Ledge Counsel and had an ADA compliance statement that was passed through Ledge Counsel that acknowledged where we've been and where we're going to and what remediation still was outstanding.
And that was passed through Ledge Council. We're going to continue working on it. It does give us a little bit of breathing room where we're not quite so stressed, where we're, where we're lacking. Um, we— the big task we still need to accomplish is that those supplementary bill documents, um, and, um We're working on it. We don't have to be compliant, but it would be nice to be completely compliant, and so we're working towards that effect.
Okay, we've run out of things to say, so we will adjourn. Thanks everybody, talk to you later.