Just what place does generative artificial intelligence have in local government?

Cabonne Council has taken a look and set some guidelines about its use in a new draft policy that’s on display for community consultation.

The council’s department leader, innovation and technology, says the rapid rise of tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini have highlighted both the potential benefits and risks associated with technology.

“GenAI presents possible opportunities to reduce manual processing and improve service delivery as well as helping staff quickly produce documents, undertake research and gain insights into data,” their report to council’s September meeting says.

“However … GenAI models are only as good as the data they can access, they may not understand what insights are valuable, they can surface old and redundant data as relevant, and they can come to the wrong conclusions.”

Council’s guidelines seek to protect privacy and personally identifiable information, and to ensure decisions are made by staff rather than AI.

Under the proposed guidelines Council staff who do use GenAI in their work must appropriate disclose that they’ve done so; verify results before using or sharing them; and ensure the data used to inform it is up to date.

Staff must still be the decision makers.

The policy was drafted by a working group including Cabonne’s general manager and senior executive assistant, executive leader of strategy, people and performance, and department leaders of governance and corporate performance and innovation and technology, then reviewed internally before being presented to councillors.

You can review Cabonne’s draft policies on the council website at https://www.cabonne.nsw.gov.au/Council/Public-Notices