Benefits and boundaries

Artificial intelligence is becoming an every day tool at a pace we could hardly have imagined a few years ago. But what is its role in local government and the way our council works? It has potential and risks – and Cabonne Council has enshrined some safeguards and responsibilities in a new Generative AI strategic policy. The aim is to enable their staff to explore AI opportunities while protecting our data - and ensuring human oversight remains at the centre. Deputy Mayor Jamie Jones said council staff had brought forward the need to put both safeguards and user responsibilities in place. “Just like the rest of the world, council has AI coming at it at a rapid pace, so we had recognised that,” he said. “AI has some really good productivity gains but we want to ensure that council as a whole is using it appropriately and ensuring that we have the proper protective privacies and securities in place and our data isn’t breached.” The policy aims to support productivity while protecting privacy, data security and council’s information. AI has the potential to help with administrative tasks including drafting routine documents, summarising reports, preparing communications material, streamlining administrative tasks and processes, and assist in sorting information, the council has explained. But the policy makes it clear that AI tools cannot make decisions on behalf of council: all decision making remains with staff. The policy also says users must appropriately disclose the use of generative AI, and results of generative AI tools must be verified by a person before use or dissemination. To protect data, any personally identifiable information used within AI applications must be de-identified first. Council staff are starting to trial these tools, but this is still early work. Any technical tools or automated systems will still need to follow existing risk and privacy checks. “It’ll help us and help staff streamline processes and reports and be able to quickly communicate with the community but we need the appropriate safe guards in place which is what this policy sets out,” Cr Jones said. “But we are mindful as a council we are in the very early stages of AI and we just want to make sure that our community data is safe and council is safe, but where we can it can be used as an appropriate tool.”