In July 2025, the Justice Department announced it would not make any additional files public from its investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The backlash against the decision was swift — and came from some unexpected corners of the internet.

A chorus of right-wing commentators and influencers openly criticized President Donald Trump and his administration for failing to follow through on their campaign promise to release the federal documents. Political podcasters who had embraced Trump during his reelection campaign were up in arms, with social media figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz publicly pressuring the administration to reverse course.

The New York Times tracked this growing discontent across the GOP base closely for months, culminating with the near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by Congress last November. An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration, according to Zach Seward, editorial director for AI initiatives at the Times. (Seward was once an associate editor at Nieman Lab.)

[...]

Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts.

[...]

“In order to adequately cover this administration — among many other sources — it seemed crucial to have an eye on influencers, largely conservative young male influencers,” Seward told me. “It turned out there were enough specific requests and enough broad interest [in the newsroom] that it made sense to automate sending that out.”

Launched a year ago, the Manosphere Report now follows about 80 podcasts hand-selected by reporters at the Times on desks covering politics, public health, and internet culture. That includes right-wing podcasts like The Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare with “Dimes Square” shock jocks Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, a successor to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. It also keeps tabs on Huberman Lab, a podcast hosted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that has been criticized for spreading health misinformation. Seward notes the report also includes some liberal-leaning shows, like MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump podcast with a largely male audience.

When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. The Times is exploring how to use this workflow to launch similar AI-generated summary reports for other beats.

[...]

The Times is not the first newsroom to turn to LLMs to parse through the mountains of audio and video material on the internet that journalists are expected to consume to keep on top of their beats. Local news outlets across the country have been using LLMs to keep tabs on school board and town hall meeting livestreams through email summaries. Last year, my colleague Neel covered “Roganbot,” a tool created by AI consulting lab Verso to generate searchable transcripts of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Among several features, the tool suggests potentially controversial or false statements to fact-check.

[...]

Seward said that the Manosphere Report was an outgrowth of one of those existing tools, called Cheatsheet.

[...]

As with the Manosphere Report, Cheatsheet is rooted in a philosophy that creating new text and images for publication is not the most effective use case for generative AI in a newsroom like the Times. Rather, Seward sees the technology as a way to amplify the newsroom’s existing investigative power.