Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

The city of Bellingham is launching an independent investigation in response to records uncovered by Cascade PBS and KNKX.

Back in August, we told you about the prevalent use of AI tools by local government employees.

We dug through public records and found a City of Bellingham employee may have asked ChatGPT for help in tipping the scales to ensure a preferred vendor was awarded a large city contract.

Reporter Nate Sanford joins us to share what he found and where this story is headed next.

Welcome, Nate.

Thank you for joining us today.

Yeah.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.

Now tell us about what you found as you investigated the ChatGPT prompts by a City of Bellingham employee.

Yeah.

So, basically, a city employee in Bellingham was looking for a new utility billing software for the City of Bellingham.

And, they were putting together basically the application materials to solicit applications from different vendors who wanted to sell their software to the city.

Right.

And there were two, two kind of messages that sort of, jumped out as potentially concerning.

In one of them, they were asking to write contract requirements in a way that would, quote, exclude this one company, without explicitly saying so, basically.

And then in another message, they asked the chat bot to write additional requirements that would favor this one other company.

And they named both those companies in the messages, which kind of raises questions about bias in what's supposed to be a fair competitive bidding process.

Basically.

And not everyone is familiar with the request for proposals process in government.

Can you explain why that is concerning?

This is, this is public money that the government is spending on services.

And so they can't just awarded contracts to whichever company they like the most, right?

They have to go through this competitive, very neutral kind of bidding process where they put out what's called a RFP, or request for proposals, and give every qualified company a chance to apply for the contract.

And then they evaluate those applications with kind of a neutral, evaluation scoring sheet, basically.

And the idea is to find the best deal for taxpayers.

Is it clear why the city employee did this?

There's no evidence to suggest that they had like a financial tie to any of the companies that applied or any sort of motivation like that, that would make things even more corrupt.

After you found this out and contacted the City of Bellingham, they told you they were launching an investigation.

What else have they told you in response?

Yeah, they haven't been able to say a whole lot, They say that they're bringing on, an independent fact finder to kind of try to figure things out.

They say they're taking it very seriously.

They said they try to make their training, their policies for procurement clear in their training procedures.

Yeah, they said it's a serious allegation that they're taking seriously, but they're really not able to share a whole lot more.

What do you think are the key takeaways from this story?

When it comes to how people should think about this issue?

Yeah.

So, I mean, one thing is that this isn't necessarily a new thing, right?

Like I talked to, a procurement fraud lawyer who's saying that like, yeah, it's not unheard of for someone to try to massage contract requirements in a way to favor one company.

So this is really just this very kind of old issue that happens in government procurement, being assisted with this new technology.

And I think it's worth noting also that, you know, at no point in the conversation did the the ChatGPT push back on the request, right.

It said, happy to help.

Let me know what else I can do to help you exclude this one company, essentially.

It's still unclear the extent to which the use of ChatGPT to write these requirements ultimately impacted which vendor was awarded the contract.

The vendor that won the contract was the one that this employee had asked for a favor.

But there are lots of factors that go into that, so it's a little unclear, but, it is sort of this new, this new thing to think about, I think.

When we think about the ways that AI can be used and potentially misused.

Thank you so much for your time.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

You can read Nate's full story on CascadePBS.org.