Reuters Institute – “The system allowed a team of OSINT specialists, reporters and computational journalists to accelerate their investigation of Russian nationalists. Any journalist who’s done online investigations knows there’s simply too much evidence for one human to ever collect or investigate. Too often, we are overwhelmed with a flood of information: tens of thousands of social media posts, images and other media. Our team from BBC Eye, which works on original documentary investigations from around the world, wanted to see if AI could help solve this problem. We opted for AI agents – a collection of large language models (LLMs) that can coordinate and execute multi-step tasks under human supervision. When connected to external environments such as the Internet or databases, these agents can fetch and analyse relevant social media content at scale, performing work that our team might otherwise not have the time to undertake. We used this approach as part of a recent published investigation on Russia’s rising nationalist vigilante movement, building a multi-agent AI system we named Haystack to help us explore new emerging forces in daily Russian life. The team included BBC Eye’s open-source investigators, who are specialists in gathering and analysing public information, and Russia-focused reporters, along with help from computational journalists at Stanford University…”