MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama Generative Artificial Intelligence Task Force met Wednesday to discuss findings of its work groups and how state government can best use the emerging technology.
The GenAI Task Force was formed in February by an Executive Order from Gov. Kay Ivey. Its purpose is to produce a report that will include recommendations on improving government efficiency with AI, particularly generative AI, an advanced subset that can generate content often indistinguishable from human-created content.
Office of Information Technology Secretary Daniel Urquhart said he could foresee possible legislation or policy changes to come out of the task force. However, he said the purpose is mostly to provide the governor with a GenAI reference guide.
“I would be careful to pass anything too stringent,” Urquhart said. “Colorado passed a very tough law that just is very punitive and it makes it hard to proceed with anything,” he said. “So you don’t want to be too rigid. The technology is still evolving. We don’t want to put ourselves in a box.”
The task force has four working groups that are dedicated to specific areas of GenAI: Policies and Governance, Workforce Education and Training, Data Management and Ownership, and Responsible and Ethical Use of GenAI.
The Policies and Governance work group reported three action items for its next meeting, OIT General Counsel Laura Howell said. First, Howell said the work group is focused on defining key terms in the AI regulatory space.
“We want to get a good handle on what generative AI means for us as people working in the government, the state of Alabama,” she said. “And then additional terms that we need to be concerned with things concerning citizens’ privacy and data usage.”
Howell said the work group is working on creating an authorization process for AI programs. She also said the group wants to put together recommendations for procurement and purchasing guidelines.
“Obviously, getting your hands around an AI program itself is one set of things to be concerned about, but we also have a lot of incidental AI usage in existing procurements,” she said.
The Workforce Education and Training work group was led by OIT’s Executive Director of Support Services Roger Bowman who said the group wants to focus on promoting safe and productive AI implementation. He said the group is working on implementing an example GenAI application to share with state agencies.
“We’re looking at a scenario where we have public data that we can train a chatbot on, and post that within an application and showcase some of the capabilities of GenAI,” he said.
Mason Tanaka with Alabama Medicaid represented the Data Management and Ownership work group and said his group is mostly focused on a statewide initiative for data literacy.
“We’re looking at this as a good opportunity for a statewide initiative to do a little bit better on local data literacy, in terms of how we use data, what data means to your particular agencies,” he said.
The task force will meet again in September, but an exact date hasn’t been set.