On September 30, 2026, Murmuration brought together researchers, organizers, journalists, and civic leaders in Boston for More Human: Life, Democracy, and Connection in the Age of AI, an exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing the ways we learn, connect, organize, and participate in civic life. Across a series of lightning talks, speakers Sarah Stamper, Abby Binder, Danielle Allen, and Susan Page examined AI’s implications for human connection, trust, learning, and democracy. Grounded in Murmuration’s research supported by the Walton Family Foundation, AI and the Human Future: Americans’ Views on Artificial Intelligence Across Life, Society, and Democracy, the conversations challenged us to look beyond what technology can do and consider what we want it to help us build—and how we can keep people, relationships, and communities at the center of our future.
About Susan Page:
Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY. She's covered 12 presidential campaigns and seven White House administrations, and she's interviewed the past 10 presidents. She is the best-selling author of biographies of Barbara Bush, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Walters, and of "The Queen and Her Presidents," out in 2026. She moderated the 2020 vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. (Yes, that was the one with the fly.)
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So when they sent me the title of the talk I was supposed to give, I plugged it into AI and asked it to deliver the entire speech, but here was Copilot's opening. Quote: "This is a timely and high-stakes topic." (Laughs) Okay, true. Then there were a bunch of other words, and at the end it said, "Let us meet this moment with confidence, vigilance, and a shared commitment to truth." So I'm for that. But it was not actually that helpful.
You know, a lot of things have changed in journalism since I got started. My first White House trip was Jimmy Carter's final cross-country campaign swing in 1980. In those days, the White House Press Corps wrote our stories on portable Olivetti typewriters, and then we filed them by Teletype. It's like saying we were mailing letters by the Pony Express, but the fact is, AT&T Teletype operators at that point traveled on the White House press charter everywhere we went.
That's different now. Technological changes have transformed the way we file the news and the way Americans get their news, and actually, USA TODAY has been at the forefront of innovation. We were ridiculed by some of our brethren for our use of colorful graphics and short stories right until the point they started using them themselves. And like everybody else, we had to deal with the rise of the Internet. At that point, a lot of journalists resisted the changes that the Internet was going to mean for us and our industry. Like, if we ignored it, maybe the Internet would go away. That cost us time and opportunity. Let's not do that again.
Now we're trying to figure out how to embrace AI as opposed to being terrified by it. It is an extraordinary tool, but it is also extraordinarily disruptive. No development in my lifetime is doing more to imperil the credibility of the news, and with that, to threaten our democracy. So AI is the worst possible news for the information ecosystem, and the question is, can we also make it the best news?
Can the problem be the solution? And do we really have a choice? Truth and trust, it's all we've got. Even before AI, it's not like we were doing so great on the truth and trust meter. Yeah, you laugh. In 1980, seven in ten Americans told Gallup they trusted the news media. In the poll that Gallup put out today, nearly seven in ten Americans say they don't.
And in Murmuration's own Civic Pulse Survey, we saw Americans' top concern about AI wasn't job loss or data centers. It was the threat of being deluged with even more misinformation and fake content. More than eight in ten are worried AI will make it harder to know what's true during elections, because with AI, you can no longer believe your own eyes.
But democracy depends on broad agreement on what's real, even if we disagree about what to do about it. So AI can help journalism, and here are a couple ways how. One, AI enabled the explosion of deepfakes. Let's use AI to find them and label them, to stamp at the top, "This is a credible source," or, "This is from a Chinese bot."
Two, one thing I hear from readers is that they don't trust anything we write, and they do their own research. So let's help them do that. Let's use AI to enable readers to look at the speech we're quoting from or to examine the data that we're trying to cite, to make our journalism more transparent.
Three, AI can crunch bigger data sets than would otherwise be feasible to identify trends or debunk lies, whether it's on melting ice caps or voter fraud or airplane crashes. Anecdotes are engaging, but data are convincing.
And four: we can use AI to do the stenography of journalism, like box scores and earnings reports and a rundown on what the school board voted to do last night. And with that, AI can free human journalists to do things that are more ambitious and that matter more.
It takes humans to develop the deep sourcing that enables reporters to find out not only what the city council passed, but why they did it, to reveal what's going on behind the scenes at the White House or the ballpark or in the big tech suites. It takes humans to go to the site of a disaster and talk to victims and survivors and first responders to tell the world what we saw and heard and smelled and what it felt like. It takes humans to interview newsmakers, presidents, athletes, or billionaires in a way that presses them, that reveals them, that sparks the spontaneity that gets past their public persona and practiced talking points.
It takes humans to provide judgment, oversight, and ethics, and it takes humans to fulfill journalists' fundamental and enduring role in civic life: to tell the truth and convince Americans they can trust us to tell the truth, and to provide the shared information upon which the decisions of a democracy can be made.
AI does not replace journalism. It makes journalism more crucial, or as Copilot advised, "Let us meet this moment with confidence, vigilance, and a shared commitment to truth."