Sonoma County employees and officials now have policy guidelines to follow in their use of AI in communications.
As part of a new policy regulating county employees’ use of artificial intelligence, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Sept. 10 approved guidelines to protect sensitive data and ensure AI usage complies with legal standards.
The policy allows county employees to use certain generative AI products, such as ChatGPT, for tasks such as creating and editing emails and letters, sales and advertising materials, spreadsheet calculations, coding development or debugging, summarizing information and drafting policies, job descriptions, memoranda and similar documents.
“We are on the cusp of the artificial intelligence revolution, and we understand the opportunities we have to harness this technology to realize efficiency and cost-savings for the public,” said Supervisor David Rabbitt, chair of the Board of Supervisors.
However, continued Rabbitt, “there is a lot that we still don’t know about AI,” and the county should cautiously proceed “in a secure and ethical manner.”
The guidelines require users to review and fact-check any output from AI technologies and to be transparent when content is drafted using AI technologies, according to a county announcement about the policy.
The policy prohibits users from submitting personal or confidential information into AI technologies. “One of the key features of AI is its ability to memorize and learn from the information and data that is shared with it so, when AI has access to county data, even self-contained AI technologies that run on county-owned and -managed systems, it may share the sensitive data that was used to train it with others,” the announcement continued.
The full Sonoma County artificial intelligence policy is here.
