MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In its final meeting, the Alabama Generative Artificial Intelligence Task Force outlined some of its recommendations in a final report to Gov. Kay Ivey, due on her desk by Nov. 30.
“We’ve had a long journey here, and this is the final task force (meeting) before we put out the report,” Daniel Urquhart, secretary of the Alabama Office of Information Technology, told task force members late last week.
Established earlier this year through executive order, the task force is charged with researching current GenAI usage – an advanced subset of AI that can generate content and perform tasks often indistinguishable from that of a human being – and how the state could best utilize said technology to improve government efficiency.
The task force’s first meeting back in April saw GenAI experts from Microsoft share potential uses for the new technology, which could include anything from assisting law enforcement to helping lawmakers draft bills. Subsequent meetings saw members focus more on developing appropriate guardrails for the technology to ensure accountability, transparency and safety, a theme that largely carried over to the task force’s final meeting on Thursday.
Aaron Wright, director of application development for the Alabama Office of Information Technology, outlined several recommendations to task force members that he said would help automate the process by which certain Gen AI systems are paired with different types of state agency data.
“One (recommendation) is to implement a standard data classification framework; we got a sample one from the University of Alabama that just helps agencies and people to know how data should be classified, and from that classification, what types of systems it should be used with when using Gen AI systems,” Wright said. “Also, regularly auditing models just to see how it’s being used.”
The potential uses for Gen AI in improving government efficiency are numerous, with California currently exploring ways to use the technology to help provide tax guidance or reduce traffic jams. As a new and still developing technology, however, the tech has its shortcomings, such as when Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop used Gen AI to draft a proposed policy on cellphone use within schools and it was riddled with errors.
To prevent such Gen AI misuses in government, human oversight was key, said Willie Fields, also with the Alabama Office of Information Technology.
“In some of these areas, we definitely need some human oversight as far as monitoring and reviewing, doing some audits on the system,” Fields said.
Transparency into the state’s use of Gen AI was another key theme of the task force’s recommendations it had developed over the past few months, something Wright explained was as simple as establishing protocols for documenting and publishing notices of how state data is being used by Gen AI.
“Enhanced public awareness and transparency so the citizens know how it is being used, and if any personal information is being used, we want them to understand how it’s being used because that transparency, I think, is really critical to the success of deployment of Gen AI systems,” Wright said.
“And we want to maintain accountability with some monitoring, we want to see what are some inaccuracies or bad outcomes, we want to recommend ways to document these things so we can keep the systems accurate going forward.”
Urquhart said that a near-final draft will be shared among task members over the weekend for review, giving the body time to make last minute changes and recommendations. That report will include detailed descriptions of the current use of Gen AI within the state’s executive branch agencies, the risks that use posses, if any, and policy recommendations for state lawmakers to potentially take up next year.
Other states have already proposed laws regulating the use of Gen AI, with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee having signed one into law earlier this year, a bill that protects musicians’ performances and voices from being misused with Gen AI.