AI & Gun Violence

Sean Horgan

During the 2024 VAC retreat in DC I led a session on AI & Gun Violence. I interested in how the various major AI chat services (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) thought about this issue.

I thought I would also experiment with NotebookLM, a service by Google that makes it easy to pull together material from different sources and use AI to generate new content, e.g. study guides and audio overviews.

I decided to test this out by creating a notebook with 2 sources:

The Everytown website

The Smoking Gun website

Here’s a screenshot of what this looks like in NotebookLM:

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I created an audio overview which takes the form of a podcast with 2 different voices discussing the content in both of the sources:

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https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d4a0e13c-102e-4832-87a8-542c5afd0e83/audio⁠

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If the notebooklm link to the audio doesn’t work, try this instead:

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This is all dynamically generated and it took just a couple of minutes. I listened to parts of it and it seemed ok but I'm not tuned into all of Everytown's policies to assess accuracy.

Here's a link to the underlying notebook, which you can use to ask questions or generate new content based on just those 2 sources:

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d4a0e13c-102e-4832-87a8-542c5afd0e83⁠

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One idea that emerged during the DC retreat is the opportunity for Everytown to help shape the use of AI in ending gun violence. Today the major AI systems pull content from across the internet much like search engines do. These systems can feel like black boxes as the sources that drive their responses aren't easy to follow which makes them susceptible to misinformation and disinformation. In less subjective fields like medicine and law there are quantitative benchmarks like board exams and the bar and researchers are publishing papers on the performance of AI on those tests, e.g.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11007479/⁠

. There are also more dynamic leaderboards that assess overall performance of different AI models across a range of capabilities:

https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard⁠

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