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Michael Finch, Chief Information Officer, Lane County Technology Services, Taina Saltysiak, Manger, Lane County Office of Data & AnalyticsOn November 30, 2022 ChatGPT was launched and with it a new era of possibilities. Like all Local Governments, Lane County, Oregon faces a landscape of needs for services in our community that greatly exceed the resources available to meet them. Technologies like ChatGPT may have a lot to offer in helping increase service levels and improve decision making. Citizen engagement, process automation, decision support and emergency response are but a few areas that Local Governments like Lane County could partner this technology with to help increase service levels. But there are many potential concerns to address before these can be realized, and we have to move quickly because it’s already changing our environment in areas such as recruitment, legal documents and vendor application development. This begs the question – what steps should we and other Local Governments be taking to speed adoption and minimize risks of revolutionary technologies such as ChatGPT? We believe the answer to this question lies in creating a team or teams that can address ethical concerns, identify services for early adoption with the biggest impact, and train and prepare the organization for how it will impact other areas they haven’t yet considered.
“By exercising human judgment, conducting thorough checks, and considering efficiency, local governments can help prevent the rapid propagation of biases and ensure that AI tools serve the entire population effectively.”
Local governments have a responsibility to support and serve all members of their communities equitably. As such the journey to leveraging ChatGPT or other generative artificial intelligence (AI) must begin in forming a team quickly to address policy and ethics. Lane County Equity Manager, Latiffe Amado, and Office of Data & Analytics Manager, Taina Saltysiak have formed an early and effective partnership looking at this immediate need. Governments cannot effectively leverage the power of these tools before first recognizing the limitations and biases inherent in them and understanding the risks and ethical implications in deploying them across the organization. We humans often view answers generated by computers as objective when they often are anything but. The reliance on AI as an objective and authoritative decision-making tool can lead to perpetuating existing societal biases. Latiffe and Taina are working to provide thought leadership and engagement with our organization of the potential good as well as the cautions and potential pitfalls to AI integration ensuring thorough due diligence in implementing and utilizing AI technologies. By exercising human judgment, conducting thorough checks, and considering efficiency, local governments can help prevent the rapid propagation of biases and ensure that AI tools serve the entire population effectively.
Even if you already have policy teams in place working to plan ahead, chances are, there are already many individuals in our organizations trying it out. Truth be told, we leveraged ChatGPT services as a partnership in crafting this paper. Telling our early adopters to stop until policy is ready is both unrealistic, since it’s already coming in from the outside, and risks disengaging a passionate workforce. Instead, Lane County seeks outreach to this community with a desire to focus their energy on identifying potential applications of the technology to services. Lane County is working to include technology business analysts as part of this team because they are skilled in identifying requirements and understanding business process change. Harnessing early adopter energy into an AI Innovation Team can jumpstart your readiness and also help inform the policy team as well as our next topic - training.
Just as there are early adopters in every organization, there are also those cranking out a ton of productivity that will appreciate clarity and training being available for any change in their daily routines. Additionally, there are service areas such as recruitment, contract generation and others that are already being impacted by ChatGPT use in the external environment. While Lane County has not yet started forming formal training content, the needs have been identified and options are being explored. For those service areas of our organization already seeing ChatGPT use impacts, we seek to engage our people and apply critical thinking to help stay ahead of changes. As a next step, Lane County looks forward to partnering a forming AI innovation team with our training program to build content as soon as possible. As stated above, human judgement and engagement are the keys to success in our evolving ChatGPT environment and we believe time spent here to help partner the technology with people directly serving our community will help speed awareness, adoption and the best outcomes.
Establishing dedicated policy, innovation and training teams focused on understanding the potential benefits and the limitations, biases, and risks in new technologies such as ChatGPT enables local governments to move more quickly to adopt them. Generative AI can be a force multiplier in the success of our missions and meeting the needs of our communities, but it’s our people that will ultimately make that possible. After all, the work we do in local government is all designed to help improve lives.
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