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Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends

PROGRAM NOTES:

Kelton, Illinois, is a canning town on the Fox River. Fifteen thousand people. A newspaper that comes out twice a week. A Lutheran church built in 1927. A VFW hall with bad carpet and cold coffee. A high school where the test scores have never been better. In the winter of 2026, the town's daily life has been quietly transformed by AI tools that draft its emails, summarize its meetings, prepare its sermons, polish its students' essays, and manage its grief. The transformation has made everything in Kelton more efficient, more professional, more articulate. It has also made something invisible disappear.

When war breaks out in the Middle East, five people in Kelton begin to feel what they cannot name. A retired canning plant worker who carries a fifty-one-year-old memory of a dock in Viet Nam. A journalist who writes two versions of every story yet usually publishes the wrong one. A pastor whose sermons have never been better and have never cost him less. A teacher who can no longer find her students in their own essays. A city councilwoman who delivers a memorial resolution to the mother of a dead soldier and cannot answer the mother's question: Who wrote this?