Twin Cities Climate Collaborative
Our approach to AI
How we use AI
Let's start with the honest part. We're a small team. Every month, the climate work happening across Minnesota shows up in thousands of places: agency press releases, nonprofit newsletters, event pages, city council agendas, local news. No two people could read all of it by hand. So we use AI to help.
Where AI helps
- Gathering. AI helps us scan thousands of sources each month for events, headlines, jobs, and new organizations.
- Sorting. It helps us tag events by topic and deduplicate listings, so the calendar stays usable.
- First-draft summaries. It drafts short summaries of events and headlines, which we then check against the original source.
- Research. Like a lot of people, we use it to get up to speed on complicated topics, such as how a utility rate case works or what a new rule actually changes.
Where it doesn't
- Deciding what matters. People choose which stories, events, and organizations make it in.
- Our voice. The intros, the reflections, the "here's what we're feeling this month" parts: those are written by us.
- Final say. Nothing goes out without a human reading it first. If something's wrong, that's on us, not a tool.
- Your data. We don't feed subscriber information into AI tools.
How we'll tell you
When a section of the newsletter was drafted with AI help, we'll say so right there in the section.
The early feedback from friends who read the newsletter was clear: AI-assisted summaries are fine, but AI-written essays aren't. We agree, and that's the line we're holding.
What worries us
We'd be dishonest if we skipped this part.
AI runs in data centers, and data centers use a lot of electricity and water. Minnesota is in the middle of that conversation right now. (We hosted a whole evening on it in September.) AI is also reshaping how people work, including writers, researchers, and organizers like us. And these tools can be confidently wrong, which is a real problem when your whole job is helping people trust what they read.
We feel the tension. We rely on AI to do this work at all, and we're uneasy about what it costs. Both are true.
What we're doing about it
- Using it on purpose. We use AI for the heavy lifting of reading and sorting, not as a replacement for thinking or writing.
- Offsetting our footprint. We're partnering with Green Cities Accord, a Twin Cities nonprofit that grows and protects urban tree canopy, to help offset the footprint of our AI use.
- Checking our work. Every fact in a summary gets checked against its source before it's published.
- Revisiting this. The tools are changing fast, and so is our thinking. We'll update this page as we learn. Last updated: October 2026.
Questions or pushback?
We'd honestly love to hear it. Email us at hello@tc3msp.org.