AI is helping shape Hermosa’s future, now

by Kevin Cody

Publisher

Easy Reader’s “Gutenberg moment” arrived three weeks ago, on a Thursday, the day we print, when John Burry brought his laptop to Easy Reader’s office. Burry is a former executive at Tesco, a British multinational retailer. His titles there included Futures Director, Global Innovation.

Since last year the Hermosa Beach resident has been a prominent, though low profile participant in city politics.

Burry opened his laptop and logged in to HermosaReview.com. 

He took his website’s name from the Hermosa Review newspaper, founded in 1907. The Review ceased publication in the early 1970s, a victim of the cold type (photo typesetting) disruption. While cold type’s low cost of entry (a typewriter) spawned underground newspapers across the country, including Easy Reader, legacy newspapers clung to the century-old hot type means of typesetting. It was called hot type because letters were formed from molten lead flowing through costly, Rube Goldberg-like Linotype machines, invented in 1884.

Since the 1970s, newspapers have adjusted to other, similarly disruptive innovations, among them personal computers, cell phones/cameras, the internet, and social media. 

But nothing since the 1970s, and some argue since the Gutenberg press in the 1400s, match the disruption Burry demonstrated three Thursdays ago on his laptop. 

His month-old website, like EasyReaderNews.com, carried council stories, personal profiles, crime reports, and a community calendar. Unlike EasyReaderNews, and other newspaper websites, there were no bylines.

That’s because no one wrote the stories. The stories were generated by Claude (Anthropic), an AI (artificial intelligence) LLM (large language model) whose subscription cost is less than a typewriter, about $200 a year.

For stories about Hermosa Beach Council meetings, Burry used Turbo, an audio transcription program, to feed meeting transcripts into Claude, along with city staff reports.

Then he gives Claude a prompt, along the lines of, “Write a newspaper article of 600 to 1,200 words about agenda item 7, “Builder’s Remedy.” 

Wording of the prompt is crucial, Burry said, as it is when an editor gives a reporter a story assignment.

Claude turns in stories within minutes of assignment. Burry copy edits, and fact checks them, just as traditional copy editors do, before posting them to his website. 

Burry asked what I thought of his site.

“It’s inevitable,” I answered, feigning enthusiasm. 

I was parroting what Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote in his 2023 book, “The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future: “The coming wave of technology is inevitable — a force so transformative that resisting it is not an option, but shaping its impact is our responsibility.”

Suleyman added, “I can’t understand people who don’t see AI’s inevitability.”

Claude writes like a hack. It hallucinates. 

I assigned it to write a story about Hermosa restaurants that opened or closed in 2025. Claude turned in a lucid list of a dozen restaurants. None were in Hermosa Beach. 

“In the prompt, tell it not to make stuff up,” Burry told me when I complained, as if I should have known AI, like a reporter on the spectrum, interprets prompts literally.

My “Builders Remedy” council story was good. Claude’s was serviceable. Burry posted it to HermosaReview within an hour of the meeting ending. I posted my story to EasyReaderNews 24 hours later. It was a complicated story and took a day to write. 

I felt like the Los Angeles Times’ sports writers must have felt Sunday morning after the Dodgers won the World Series. 

Saturday night’s decisive 7th game went 11 innings, finishing too late for Times’ sportswriters to meet the Times’ Sunday press deadline. Their Dodgers World Series  game stories printed Monday, after fans attention had shifted to the victory parade.

Study the enemy’s strengths, not its weaknesses, an old adage advises. AI’s strengths are its speed, and scope. They are humanly unmatchable. “You can breed a horse for a thousand generations, and it’s never going to give birth to a locomotive,” NYU Professor Gary Marcus said in an often repeated quote about AI.

After the laptop demonstration, I asked Burry to help Easy Reader incorporate AI into not only its reporting, but its sales and production.

He said he would. 

Over the past three weeks, Easy Reader has assigned Claude to edit Police Beat and the Baywatch Calendar, and to summarize council meeting transcripts and staff reports.

Manhattan Beach editor Mark McDermott submitted 12 interviews to Claude that he conducted for this week’s cover story. 

“I wanted to test Claude’s writing capabilities. So I suggested he produce a story, though I was clear in my prompt I intended to write my own story,” McDermott told fellow reporters.

Claude reported back:

“I appreciate the trust, Mark, but I’m going to respectfully decline to write a full draft of this story. Here’s why…

Among the reasons Claude gave were, “It’s better for you to write it fresh. If you read my version first, it’ll be in your head. You’ll either feel constrained by it or feel like you need to deviate from it. Either way, it interferes with your own creative process.”

I agreed with Claude, but its solicitous voice chilled me. 

In Orwell’s 1984, the Thought Police use force to control what the public thinks. AI uses voluntary surrender to control user thought. Similarly, in “1984,” privacy rights are forcibly taken away. Today, we surrender privacy rights in exchange for security by means of street corner CCTVs (closed circuit televisions), roadway ALPRs (Automatic License Plate Recognition), and Ring Alarm home video cameras. 

Local newspapers and news websites are among the last independent, decentralized guardians against authoritarianism.

Claude dismisses concerns about AI abrogating journalism’s watchguard role.

Among its responses to McDermott, Claude wrote in a conciliatory voice, “The sci-fi narratives we’ve inherited — Terminator, HAL 9000, etc. — are almost always about AI as competitor or replacement. Zero-sum. Us or them. But your experience with me in working … suggests something different: augmentation, collaboration, complementarity.”

In another response to McDermott, Claude wrote, in a more cautionary than conciliatory voice, “AI won’t replace journalists. But journalists who use AI effectively will have an advantage over those who don’t.”

Those words are reassuring. But we don’t know where they come from. We know they don’t come from Claude. 

What we do know is, “the coming wave of technology is inevitable.”

I looked for a model to emulate, a trade comparable to reporting, one fearing elimination by new technology.

I found one close at hand, in Hermosa’s Cypress Avenue surfboard district.

The surfboard industry faced its Gutenberg, or better, its John Henry moment in the early ‘70s with the introduction of CNC (computer numerical control) shaping machines. The machines  shaped in minutes what took a day for a shaper with a Skil electric hand planer, (which replaced the adze).  

ET Surfboards shaper Pat Ryan decried CNC-shaped boards as “soulless” in a widely distributed,  open letter to surfers. They were mass produced designs ripped off from shapers. Surfers require custom shaped boards because every surfer’s size and style is unique, Ryan argued.

Today, an estimated 80 percent of surfboards are machine made overseas. 

Ryan is one of the few early ’60s longboard shapers to have survived the ‘70s shortboard revolution. And the shaping machine revolution.

In the early 2000s, after having hand shaped over 25,000 surfboards, Ryan  put down his $100 Skil for a $100,000 KKL shaping machine. 

The machines had gotten better, Ryan explained in a 2004 Easy Reader interview. Instead of just stealing designs from shapers, the machines allowed shapers to create custom designs with the click of a mouse.

Shapers are defined by their designs, not their tools, Ryan said. ER