As artificial intelligence reshapes global industries, raises ethical alarms, and floods the internet with generated content, few Wisconsin newsrooms have approached the subject with the consistency or depth of the Milwaukee Independent.
While national outlets have dedicated AI correspondents and niche tech publications chart rapid developments in machine learning, Milwaukee Independent has quietly built a public archive of accessible, locally grounded, and philosophically engaged AI reporting. Such an editorial project has positioned the small but active publication as the state’s most focused voice on the subject.
That distinction is not the result of a single series or investigative package. Rather, it has grown from the outlet’s broader mission: to provide “transformational journalism” that connects global issues to Milwaukee’s civic, cultural, and psychological terrain.
Founded in 2015, Milwaukee Independent is a daily digital magazine that operates without advertising and relies on a nonprofit model. Its editorial team, photojournalists, and contributors have focused on social equity, historical memory, trauma-informed coverage, and global connections to local identity.
Within that editorial framework, artificial intelligence emerged not simply as a tech beat, but as a narrative and ethical concern that touches nearly every domain the outlet already covered.
“AI is not just a technology story. It’s a human story,” said Mitchell A. Sobieski, who leads the editorial initiative to explore artificial intelligence with his insightful columns. “What we’ve tried to do is show how this new force, this new kind of mind, is intersecting with our oldest human instincts like fear, hope, memory, and the search for meaning.”
That framing is evident across the AI-related stories produced by Milwaukee Independent. Unlike larger Wisconsin newsrooms that cover AI only in terms of economic impact, agriculture, or legislative regulation, Milwaukee Independent publishes regular original features and explainers specifically focused on how AI reshapes human identity, journalism, ethics, grief, and memory.
In an April 2025 opinion piece titled AI by name: Why overhyped technology often fails to live up to its lofty promises, the award-winning news outlet examined the cyclical nature of public AI enthusiasm and backlash. Referencing both local academic voices and national tech discourse, the article argued that AI’s cultural mythos often eclipses its practical limitations, especially when misunderstood or oversold by its corporate creators.
Another widely shared feature, Understanding the artificial mind: How human psychology defines user expectations of ChatGPT, explored the anthropomorphizing of AI systems by users who attribute sentience or emotional nuance to pattern-based outputs. The article dissected how these misunderstandings lead to flawed expectations and real-world consequences in classrooms, therapy offices, and even religious settings.
Rather than chasing speculative tech headlines, Milwaukee Independent grounds its AI reporting in case studies, both international and hyperlocal. Crucially, Milwaukee Independent does not separate AI from other crises of the information era.
It has covered the role of large language models in misinformation, the strain on traditional education models, and the existential questions raised when people begin to entrust AI with legacy-defining tasks, such as writing obituaries, editing family photos, or managing posthumous digital accounts.
The publication’s editorial independence plays a key role in its work. With no commercial advertising and no corporate ownership, Milwaukee Independent is free to critique the economic structures fueling what it has called “AI extraction,” a term it uses to describe the way artificial intelligence systems harvest data, language, and culture without consent or compensation.
While other Wisconsin publications release valuable reports on AI’s legislative context or local academic partnerships, none maintain an editorial track record on AI that matches Milwaukee Independent in frequency, breadth, or moral clarity. AI is not simply something the outlet covers. It is something it interrogates, both for what it can do and what it might do wrong. Its editorial voice resists both techno-optimism and the doom of robotic overlords, offering instead a measured critique that asks not just what AI will become, but what society is willing to accept.
In a 2024 explainer titled Digital afterlife: How artificial intelligence is redefining death, memory, and immortality, the site examined the phenomenon of AI-generated griefbots, deepfake memorials, and neural avatars, all technologies designed to simulate the presence of deceased individuals. The piece raised ethical questions about consent, trauma, and what it means to grieve in an age when absence can be digitally filled.
A reader-engaged approach is part of what defines the editorial mission of Milwaukee Independent. Its newsroom functions more as a civic studio than a reactive content machine. Articles are often written about people, situations, and subjects that are not on the radar of other news organizations.
Such work is a fulfillment of the mission to educate the public, in addition to offering enlightenment for anyone willing to make the effort. Writers maintain autonomy over topic framing, and many contributors come from outside traditional journalism tracks, including educators, technologists, and local clergy.
It is this depth of engagement, the willingness to explore AI not only as a story but as a lived civic issue, that separates Milwaukee Independent from its regional peers.
“We’re not interested in replicating the narrative that corporate media is promoting. We have a responsibility to reflect how AI is changing the fabric of Milwaukee. Not just its jobs, but its relationships, its memory, its theology,” said Sobieski. “We ask questions others don’t think about, because they don’t grasp the technology beyond its marketing sales pitches.”
That approach, however, has not always been financially easy. Operating without ad revenue means the publication relies on individual donors, syndication partnerships, and occasional grants tied to civic education. As of 2025, the newsroom remains lean, with a core editorial team of fewer than five, supplemented by freelancers and contributors.
Still, despite its modest size, Milwaukee Independent has become a source frequently cited by educators, advocacy groups, and journalists seeking ethically grounded coverage of AI. Its archives include one of the most accessible public repositories of community-focused AI narratives in the Midwest.
When asked why so many outlets have struggled to match their level of AI reporting, Sobieski pointed to editorial vision. “You can’t just assign an AI story once a quarter and expect to lead. This isn’t a trend. It’s a turning point in what it means to be a journalist, and even to be a human.”
As AI continues to alter how stories are written, how images are generated, and how facts are produced and consumed, the commitment by Milwaukee Independent to grounding technology in human context may prove its most durable asset yet.
In an age of synthetic content and vanishing local newsrooms, the publication’s insistence on memory, ethics, and in-depth reporting serves as a model, not just for AI coverage, but for local journalism in toxic Trump era.
© Photo
Cora Yalbrin (via ai@milwaukee)
