Is your mayor using ChatGPT? Here’s how to FOIA around and find out
Last year, Nate Sanford filed a “silly story” for Spokane’s alt-weekly Inlander about a state senator getting into a Twitter argument with an AI porn spambot. The bot was eventually suspended after Spokane’s mayor reported the account.
But a city employee mentioned to Sanford, now a reporter at KNKX and Cascade PBS, that they’d been testing AI tools at work. That offhand comment sparked Sanford’s curiosity about how local governments were actually using generative artificial intelligence and led to a series of investigations that revealed how chatbots are quietly embedding into the machinery of local government.
Sanford used extensive public records of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot logs from city employees to show, among other things, the city of Bellingham’s draft AI policy was written with the help of ChatGPT.
I get excited when I see an intriguing use of FOIA to demystify local government. And leading Poynter’s AI work, you can imagine how I geeked out when I saw Sanford’s investigations.
Related Knowledge Center: Artificial intelligence
On top of a failing business model, newsrooms must navigate the powerful — and not fully reliable — new capabilities of artificial intelligence and the deployment of large language models.
State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property
Related Knowledge Center: Local media
The hollowing out of the local news ecosystem has been well documented; in some communities, efforts are underway to reverse the growing news desert.