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NYC Council Committee of the Whole, October 5, 2026 › What each group talked about

What each group talked about

Oversight - Examining the Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence. For each group of speakers, the phrases they used far more often than everyone else at the hearing. Each page has a word cloud, a bar chart of counts, and the data as a table.

Read every question Council Members asked the City, and the administration's answers.

Speaker groups

Individual speakers

Individual pages are for the two invited panels: the four AI company representatives and the three former AI-company employees on the whistleblower panel.

Each person is compared with everyone else at the hearing, including the rest of their own group. Phrases said at least 2 times count, because some spoke only briefly.

How this was made

“Distinctive” means a phrase a group said much more often than all other speakers, after allowing for how much each side talked, scored with the weighted log-odds test in Monroe, Colaresi and Quinn (2008), “Fightin' Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict,” Political Analysis 16(4). Counts come from the clean verbatim transcript. Groups come from AI-assigned speaker labels. This is a machine transcript; check the video before quoting anyone. Each page explains the details. Code: scripts/build_wordclouds.py.

Common words, speakers' names, “New York”, “city”, “AI” and hearing boilerplate are left out. Beyond a standard list of common words, filler (polite forms, connecting words, generic verbs) was removed by hand: an AI assistant, working at BetaNYC's direction, reviewed each group's and each person's list and proposed the cuts. The full list of removed words is in scripts/meta/wordclouds.json.

BetaNYC, which built these pages, testified at this hearing and is counted among the public witnesses.