Another Iowa county is considering guidelines for how county employees may use artificial intelligence. Dalton Morrison — the Information Technology Director for Carroll County — raised the issue during this week’s county board of supervisors meeting.
“I’m bringing forward this draft of this AI policy to establish that everyone may use AI tools,” Morrison said, “but we just need to protect county information while we’re doing it.”
Morrison would like to set up an approval process he would oversee. The county currently has a subscription for Open AI’s Chat GPT. “That does cost maybe like $20 or $30 a month per user,” he said, “but the benefit of this any information I put into that model is not used to train other models for the free accounts.”
Morrison said the policy isn’t meant to discourage using AI to make the county’s operations more efficient, but he said it’s prudent to have guardrails in place. “It’s very important that we do get this done because people are using the tools,” Morrison said. “We need to protect ourselves as well.”
Several Iowa counties have created or adopted policies regulating how their employees use artificial intelligence, like prohibiting the Social Security numbers of county residents to be entered in the platforms. Poweshiek County’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved their AI policy earlier this month.
(By Nathan Konz, KCIM, Carroll)