NYC Council Committee on Technology, October 16, 2026 › What each group talked about
What Council Members talked about
Julie Menin (62 turns), Carmen De La Rosa (50 turns), Virginia Maloney (8 turns), Jennifer Gutiérrez (7 turns), Mercedes Narcisse (3 turns) · Including Speaker Menin and Chair De La Rosa, who asked most of the questions · 130 turns, about 52.9 minutes, 7,779 words
Each speaker in this group on their own: Julie Menin (Speaker), Carmen De La Rosa (Council Member, chair of the Committee on Technology).
Phrases Council Members used far more than everyone else
Bigger means more distinctive: used often here, rarely by everyone else. The 12 most distinctive are blue and largest. Hover or tab to a phrase for its counts. The full list is in the table below.
How many times Council Members said it
The 13 most distinctive phrases, ordered by how many times Council Members said each one in about 52.9 minutes of talk. The gray number in parentheses is how many times everyone else said it across the rest of the 2-hour hearing.
Show the data as a table
| Phrase | This group | Everyone else | Distinctiveness score |
|---|---|---|---|
| sexualized | 17 | 2 | 3.32 |
| image | 16 | 1 | 3.08 |
| last week | 12 | 3 | 2.64 |
| spacexai | 22 | 12 | 2.58 |
| idea | 10 | 1 | 2.53 |
| asked | 9 | 1 | 2.41 |
| Grok | 28 | 19 | 2.39 |
| pass | 8 | 1 | 2.28 |
| third party | 12 | 5 | 2.24 |
| agents | 8 | 2 | 2.16 |
| reported | 8 | 2 | 2.16 |
| answers | 7 | 1 | 2.13 |
| images | 9 | 3 | 2.12 |
How this was made
- “Distinctive” means a phrase this group said much more often than all other speakers at the hearing, after allowing for how much each side talked. A phrase someone says often but everyone else also says often is not distinctive.
- Each phrase gets a score from 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). We keep phrases said at least 3 times with a score above 1.96, a common cutoff; with thousands of phrases tested, a few may pass by chance, so read the list as a guide, not proof. When a short phrase almost always appears inside a longer one, only the longer one is shown.
- Counts are how many times each 1- to 3-word phrase occurs in the clean verbatim transcript. Hyphenated words are counted as separate words (“self-improvement” is “self improvement”), and a few terms the transcript spells more than one way are counted as one (“super intelligent” as “superintelligent”, “kill switches” as “kill switch”, “open-weight” and “affected parties” as one term).
- Common words, speakers' names, “New York”, “city”, “AI” and hearing boilerplate are left out, using the word lists made for the 2026-10-05 hearing, which include filler an AI assistant proposed cutting from that hearing's lists. This hearing's lists were not reviewed by hand. Word lists: scripts/meta/wordclouds.json; this hearing's groups: scripts/meta/2026-10-16-technology-ai-wordclouds.json.
- Speaker groups come from the speaker labels, which were assigned by AI agents working from self-introductions, the chair calling on people, and voice clusters, at BetaNYC's direction. Each label's role sets its group. A mislabeled turn counts toward the wrong group.
- 56 turns at this hearing hold two voices; their words count toward the person named on the turn, so a cloud can include some words said by another speaker. On this page, 2,447 of the 7,779 words are in such turns.
- This is a machine transcript, not an official record. Check the video before quoting anyone; search the clean transcript to find where a phrase was said.
- Data: council-members.csv (every phrase that passed). Code:
scripts/build_wordclouds.py.