Several Iowa municipalities are crafting new guidelines about how civic employees should — and shouldn’t — use artificial intelligence.
Johnson County IT director Bill Horning says these types of policies are important for protecting sensitive information, and his county’s employees may soon have to report if and how they use AI.
“AI tools are a great assistance in doing things, but we can’t just put data out there. AI learns from being fed information,” Horning says. “So you put county data in there, it has that county data going forward. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, erase everything I told you.’ It doesn’t work that way. Once it’s there, it’s there.”
For example, if a county worker asks ChatGPT to smooth out an email they’ve just written, any information in that email is now part of ChatGPT. Horning says employees need to be trained on when to use AI and what to do afterwards.
“If you’re using AI, you need to document what you did, what parameters you use, what did you use that tool for, all the details about that,” Horning says. “So if there’s an incident later on, we can go back and review that information.”
Black Hawk, Pottawattamie, Sioux and Woodbury are some other counties that have created their own guidelines, while Iowa state employees also have to follow an AI policy.
Horning says the guidelines are necessary, especially as AI gets more embedded in common software, like Microsoft’s Copilot and Googe’s Gemini.
(By Eliza Billingham, Iowa Public Radio)