Newsroom Robots Simon Willison: How Datasette Helps with Investigative Reporting (Part 2)
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Dec 2, 2023 
Simon Willison, Former software architect at The Guardian and a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, built Datasette to help journalists analyze data. He shares fun use cases of ChatGPT and discusses the intersection of data journalism and coding using GPT-3. They explore the use of ChatGPT for satirical news articles and address bias in story generation.
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Tool For Medium-Sized Data Workflows
- Datasette fills the niche for small-to-medium datasets that are too big for spreadsheets but not worth full engineering work.
- It offers browsing, filtering, and a JSON API plus plugins to extend functionality for journalists.
Offer Both Hosted And Local Installs
- Provide hosted, one-click installs for non-technical newsroom users instead of requiring Python installation.
- Offer both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options so teams can choose based on security and convenience.
LLMs Changed The Product Roadmap
- LLM tools like ChatGPT Code Interpreter suddenly implemented many features Datasette planned for years.
- That pushed Datasette to combine its plugin system with AI to stay valuable for journalists.