1. King County is using what it calls an “innovative tool” to train 4,000 executive branch employees on how to prevent waste, fraud, and misuse of public dollars: A series of short videos in which an uncanny AI avatar, wearing a tech CEO-style quarter-zip fleece, recites scripts about various training topics in front of shelves filled with leather-bound books.

According to a King County spokesperson, the videos are part of a new training protocol the county instituted “as part of Executive Girmay Zahilay’s Better Government actions,” after an audit found potential fraud, waste, and abuse of funds in youth contracts overseen by the Department of Community and Human Services.

A quick reverse image search found dozens of identical-looking videos produced for a wide range of small companies, from a “dental AI” company to a rare-earth metal dealer to a flower shop.

Usually, the AI speaks with a plummy British accent, but occasionally it speaks in other languages, like German, or in the American accent King County’s IT department chose for the training videos. The county’s spokesperson said they used a company called Synesthesia Limited because it allows text-to-voice script conversions.

The King County spokesperson said the AI videos are based on an anti-fraud training DCHS launched in April, and said the content was generated by humans at DCHS, “in consultation with King County’s Finance and Business Operations Division.”

“King County embraces the use of innovative tools, including AI,” the spokesperson said. “The training went through multiple reviews internally to ensure accuracy, the AI-generated presenter has been disclosed to staff, and no prohibited County data was provided to the AI service.”

We think they dost protest a bit too much. Our question was, “Does DCHS believe this kind of AI talking head video is an effective training tool, and if so, why?”

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2. The Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce released another batch of poll results on Thursday. (The first poll, done in collaboration with Challenge Seattle and released earlier this week, purported to show overwhelming support for police camera surveillance in Seattle neighborhoods). One poll question found that Mayor Katie Wilson’s approval rating has slipped 20 percentage points, to 37 percent; the other showed broad public support for a long list of potential public safety strategies and interventions.

Local media outlets interpreted the results as bad news for Wilson, which is certainly the case with her approval rating. But it’s worth noting, as my friend and colleague Marcus Harrison Green did on Bluesky, that approval ratings don’t exist in a vacuum: The same media that’s dutifully reporting on the mayor’s drop in support has also spent the last several weeks falling over themselves to blame Wilson for a delayed press conference after a shooting at the Bite of Seattle last month and suggest that she fired former police chief Shon Barnes on a baseless whim. (Marcus, citing his podcast co-host Nora Kenworthy, also pointed out that the backlash is transparently gendered, and I’ll add that it’s also ageist—no one would say Bruce Harrell had no right to fire his department heads or tell them what to do.)

As we’ve noted, Wilson had many pre-existing reasons for letting the police chief go—beyond his embarrassing explosion at a reporter who asked him a question, arguably a fireable offense in itself. And many in the mainstream press have done a disservice to their profession by failing to ask basic questions Barnes’ role in delaying his own department’s press conference while he waited to be briefed from his hotel room in Dallas. The press, as much as any official action or press release, create public opinion, and they’ve been working overtime to make Wilson look feckless, incompetent, and out of bounds.

The responses to the public safety questions, which the Chamber characterized as a sign of  “growing concern among voters about public safety,” are not so much… that, as they are a sign that people continue to support a combination of punishment (arrests and jail) and services (treatment and housing). Although the Seattle Times (which ran the news under the headline “Seattle voters are done waiting on public safety, new poll finds”) was “staggered” by the fact that people like ideas like foot patrols and drug treatment, these concepts generally poll well, as do ideas like banning encampments near schools and in public parks.

None of the coverage I’ve seen added much context to the poll results. Context like: SPD has said it lacks the resources to do regular foot patrols , or the fact that the city already prohibits sleeping in parks. The wording of questions like these is both misleading (suggesting that the mayor could do these things but is refusing) and designed to elicit a positive response. They are, in other words, predictable. But to a mainstream press invested in promoting a narrative of “socialist failure” (Wilson, who’s overseen steady improvement in public safety and increased police hiring, is hardly Leon Trotsky), the results of a business poll are just more evidence the mayor is refusing to give voters what they want.