Meet Lyle, VNN’s new Indian Country Chatbot 

(MUSCOGEE RESERVATION) After several months of development, “Lyle”, an AI-powered chatbot designed to fight misinformation and disinformation in Indian Country, is now ready to chat with you.  

Ask Lyle who he is, and he will likely respond that he is “an innovative, culturally grounded AI-powered chatbot designed to serve Native American communities by providing reliable, culturally informed, and fact-checked information.” 

Chatbot development began in December 2024, thanks to the JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative. The development team was led by Verified News Network (VNN) President and CEO Kelly Tidwell (Muscogee and Cherokee), assisted by a team of Native and Native-ally professionals. 

“VNN is a family company. Creating a technological tool to not just benefit community members today, but also future generations is paramount,” Tidwell said. “Misinformation and disinformation, stereotypes, lack of historic knowledge. These are all major issues causing damage in Indian Country. Our hope is Lyle can help to improve those issues, and inspire others to do the same.” 

Access the Lyle the Indian Country Chabot overview here.

Lyle was designed to be culturally informed from the beginning, trained on resources produced by Indigenous-led organizations as well as Indigenous people. All sources used to train the chatbot were also obtained with permission. 

“A big concern for some tribes and Indigenous people is data sovereignty,” Tidwell said. “Traditionally, Artificial Intelligence has been known to simply take and train. If it’s on the internet, it’s fair game. But we didn’t want to do that. It made the process more challenging, but it also ensured respect and, of course, accuracy. Clearly not everything out in the world wide web serves or accurately reflects Indian Country.”

Lyle is paving the way for Indigenous-led information tools, especially needed in Oklahoma amidst ongoing conflict between some of Oklahoma’s tribes and the state’s executive branch.

This year alone, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has taken to traditional social media multiple times to promote language misinforming the public that jurisdictional disagreements involving tribal members are based on race rather than citizenship. This includes condemning a recent agreement between the Muscogee Creek Nation and the City of Tulsa as a "backroom deal". 

Developed on the Muscogee Reservation, Lyle greets visitors in the Muscogee language. Other ties to the Muscogee people include being named after Tidwell’s great grandmother, Alice Lyle Schoonover, who was sent to Eufaula Indian Boarding School. She later traveled the country advocating on behalf of Native Americans and others in their needs for survival.

Lyle’s image was created by Maddie Sanders, known as Holatte (ho-lah-tee), a Mvskoke and Mojave artist from Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and inspired by Tidwell’s father, Leroy.  

To chat with Lyle, visit https://indiancountrychatbot.com/ and click on the orange chat icon on the bottom right of the page.