Welcome to the Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

It's a question almost no one else was asking.

How are government employees using AI tools in their work?

But last year, a Cascade PBS reporter started asking about AI in Washington.

His reporting has uncovered novel uses and potential abuses of the technology, and has led to some similar news investigations here and across the country.

Last year, reporter Nate Sanford put in public information requests to many cities in the region for chat logs of employees using ChatGPT.

In August, he published his first stories looking into this topic and found many concerning or questionable uses of artificial intelligence tools.

He did a follow up story about an employee allegedly using ChatGPT to favor a specific vendor for a city contract that led to an investigation in Bellingham.

Sanford is a reporter for Cascade PBS and KNKX, and he comes to our newsroom from the WSU Murrow News Fellowship, which is funded by the state.

He tells us more about the impact his work is having.

What were some of the key findings from your reporting?

Yeah, so we ended up getting back thousands of records from different government agencies.

And I think it really showed that the technology is pretty widespread.

It's being used by a lot of people for a lot of different things.

We saw it being used for tasks like writing emails to constituents, policy advice, drafting speeches, writing social media posts.

You've also heard from a lot of different community groups, including those in Snohomish County.

Can you tell us what's happening there?

So one kind of question the reporting raised was some concern about a lack of both a lack of transparency and also the lack of really firm guardrails for how this technology should be be used, right?

Because people are just experimenting with it and using it for all these different things.

And there hasn't been a ton of community conversation about that.

So in Snohomish County, after my initial reporting came out, the county council there had this conversation and realized that they need an AI policy, basically.

And so right now they're kind of assembling this, it's called a citizens' assembly.

So it's going to be a group of about 40 people.

And this group of 40 people is going to be basically gathering and working together to research AI issues and study different policies that exist in other places.

And then they're going to try to write an AI policy for Snohomish County, which is kind of a new, interesting thing that hasn't really been tried before, where you have citizens gathering like this to grapple with these questions about how and if they want their government leaders to be using this new technology.

Your work has also inspired other journalists across the country.

What have you heard from them?

Yeah, I've heard from a lot of reporters in different outlets across the country who are kind of trying similar, similar records requests in their own jurisdictions.

And some of them have encountered challenges trying to get those records.

But some have published stories already, and it's been really interesting to see the similarities in a lot of jurisdictions, really.

We just saw a story in Chattanooga a few days ago.

Some reporters there also obtained lots of chatbot records from their local government.

And one interesting thing they found, similar to what we found in Bellingham, is that, AI had actually been used to write the AI policy in that city, - Interesting.

which is exactly what we found, also, when we looked at some chatbot records from Bellingham.

In addition to journalists reaching out, you've also heard from researchers from universities like Stanford.

Yeah at Stanford, this group of researchers are basically starting this new project where they're going to be trying to file hundreds of records both at the state, federal, and even international level.

And the goal is to assemble this data repository, of all these different government chat logs, which is going to be useful for both CS researchers, just from the perspective of having this data to analyze and see how people are actually using these tools because there isn't, the companies themselves don't make this available.

But being able to break down that data and see what are the most common uses?

How are different governments using it?

They hope it's going to be really illuminating from an academic perspective.

So that's going to be a long term, big project, but I think it could be really revealing.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching the Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest news.

Go to CascadePBS.org for more.