Infrastructure, data, natural resources and people. Investigating the artificial intelligence supply chain

In collaboration with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network

Artificial intelligence now shapes stories on almost every desk in the newsroom. Reporters covering labour, politics, science or the environment increasingly find the same technology at the centre of what they investigate: the workers who label the data that trains AI systems, often for low pay and little recognition; the automated decisions that determine who gets a job, a loan or a welfare payment; and the data centres whose demand for electricity and water is reshaping the towns that host them. This panel offers practical methods for investigating AI at each stage of its development: how these systems are built and trained, and how they are used once released. It draws on the Pulitzer Center's "AI Spotlight Series", a free training programme created with the journalist Karen Hao, author of the bestselling Empire of AI, on the company that makes ChatGPT, and other leading reporters. The Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Fellows, journalists it funds and trains through a network it began in 2022, will describe the obstacles they met in their own investigations and how they worked past them. By the end, participants should feel more confident reporting on AI, and better able to tell stories about it that rest on evidence rather than on marketing hype or predictions of doom.