Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Wary of increased use of artificial intelligence, the Eureka City Council is advancing rules to bring it under control.
At its March 17 meeting, the council approved a new policy to define the scope in which artificial intelligence may be used by city employees.
But it's just a first step.
Some council members described AI as dangerous to the environment and and to society.
In a presentation, Finance Director Lane Millar said the heart of the Policy is generative AI, which is used for tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
The policy's fundamental rules prohibit submitting confidential information to AI platforms, require double checking of AI generated content, and mandate transparency on when AI has been used for research or to create content.
A public comment period only had one taker, a caller who described AI as an industry, a field that is absolutely captured by a class of psychopaths with a dystopian future intended for all of us.
That opinion got some degree of backup from council members.
Councilmember Katie Moulton warned against using AI at all.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: I want to start by saying that because of the environmental, cultural and intellectual degradation caused by the use of AI, I don't think we should be using it at all. I don't think that the city should use it. I don't think that people should use it, at least not in its current form. But that boat has long since sailed.
Students who use AI lose the ability to think critically, and it stands to reason that employees who use AI lose the ability to lose practice on those skills that they have earned and that they were hired for. I think our use of AI should be extremely limited, basically to really controlled analysis. Our employees need to read and write their own emails. There is a strong potential for brain drain.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Council member Leslie Castellano was less condemning, saying AI can be a tool, but having policy on it is important.
Council member Renee Contreras Deloj said her opinions are quote, a little bit closer to Council Member Moulton's and our public commenter and she described AI as a consumptive industry that makes communication generic.
[00:02:37] Speaker C: I have a lot of concerns about AI. I think it is the latest toy, so to speak, but it's not. It's infrastructure for other things and it like other types of industries that kind of just hoover up resources and create environmental degradation. Its path that is, that is occurring and I think and for my. And I and I can tell too because I have to read so many different things. I can tell when it's landing in front of me and I can see it in reports and I can see it in emails. I can spot it pretty fast. Which means that I am still hearing the tone of that well enough for me to spot sometimes in documents that I'm looking at.
So it hasn't been changed enough to mute that machine voice. I can still detect it and I'm not the only one. And so I think it's a, a big problem.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Sensing concern, Millar suggested control of AI is limited.
[00:03:40] Speaker D: Our ability to monitor what staff is doing sometimes, I mean, we're limited.
So as much as you, as we restrict through this policy, it might look good on paper, but our ability to actually keep employees from using these tools could be difficult. And then in addition to that, a lot of the software programs we have already do have some pretty sophisticated AI tools. So I think it would be important to really define when a tool is okay versus not okay, because currently multiple programs that we have can go as far as they can read your emails and look at an attachment, and if that attachment is a invoice, it can actually pull out details from that invoice and get it ready for payment processing.
So the technology is pretty advanced and that's why it's hard to put into policy, because it's really like talking about 20 things at once sometimes.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Millar suggested having a study session or creating a small working group on the policy.
With council member Mario Fernandez absent. The council voted to approve the policy for now, but to revisit it no later than the second meeting in April.
In the meantime, an ad hoc committee made up of Moulton and Castellano will work with staff on amending the policy in line with the issues that had been discussed during his presentation. Millar said AI is very good at producing a lot of content very quickly and gave the example of a poem about eureka produced by ChatGPT literally in seconds.
The poem mentions the city's Victorian queens, the Carson mansion, fog, redwoods and the waterfront fishing industry, and ends by saying, the city stands in moss draped grace, a wild salt dusted timeless place in Eureka. For KMUD News, this is Daniel Mintz.
