From town hall prep to disaster predictions: Mayors descend on Washington to learn how they can use generative AI in their cities
More than 100 mayors attended Bloomberg CityLab’s Mayors Innovation Studio to learn about using artificial intelligence in city government.
Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
More than 100 mayors descended on Washington, D.C. this week to learn how generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could help them better run their cities.
The mayors sought to learn how the cutting-edge technology could help them do everything from better predicting which areas would be most affected by natural disasters to making it easier for residents to navigate city services.
The roughly four-hour Mayors Innovation Studio, hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ CityLab on Wednesday, is an example of how generative AI tools are making their way into many aspects of life and every level of government. While only 2% of cities surveyed by Bloomberg Philanthropies said they’re actively implementing the technology, 69% said they were actively exploring or testing it and 96% of surveyed mayors said they were interested in using it.
In Washington, where much of the discussion of AI has centered around how Capitol Hill should place broad guardrails on the technology, the session provided a glimpse into how local governments may be among the first to harness the power of AI to serve their constituents, even as federal lawmakers debate lofty principles.
“Cities are places of action, where new solutions hit the ground,” said James Anderson, who leads government innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, in a phone interview prior to the event. Cities are “the last mile and often the first mile in terms of the innovations,” he added.
James Anderson, head of government innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, introduces mayors to the Mayors Innovation Studio on AI.
Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
Policies governing tech have increasingly become the domain of state and local governments as Congress has failed to pass many major tech bills, like those protecting digital privacy or creating guardrails for kids on the internet. Meanwhile, states have taken such matters into their own hands, which many tech companies fear creates a patchwork of regulation that’s difficult to comply with.
The focus of Wednesday’s session was primarily on how generative AI may streamline processes for cities or offer new insights to make them safer or more efficient. The pandemic showcased the power of local governments harnessing data, Anderson noted, when many built dashboards of local Covid cases and hospitalizations.
Early in the session, Mitch Weiss, a Harvard Business School professor and former chief of staff to a former Boston mayor, demonstrated how the group might use ChatGPT to better understand and solve a local issue. Weiss used the example of “storrowing” in Boston, when trucks scrape their tops off while going under a low-clearance bridge.
Weiss prompted the chatbot to channel various experts to give their opinions and come up with solutions to reduce the issue and asked the AI questions like why warnings for low-clearance bridges weren’t working. ChatGPT said drivers were distracted, unfamiliar with the area, or over-relying on GPS.
At one point, he prompted ChatGPT to create a line graph from an open dataset of such incidents in New York City, and many in the room wowed when a graph with a steep drop in incidents quickly materialized. He asked for a hypothesis for what may have improved New York City’s storrowing compared to Boston, and ChatGPT suggested improved infrastructure, better signage, modern GPS and awareness programs may have contributed to the decline.
In one instance, just for fun, he asked ChatGPT for wacky solutions to the problem. The AI chatbot suggested a truck catapult. He also asked for more realistic solutions inspired by the wacky ones, and ChatGPT suggested a designated detour route.
Using AI for summer job programs and town halls
Later, Weiss prompted ChatGPT to create a form advertising a new summer jobs program with a city and target it in a way that would appeal to teens. The AI came up with the branding of a “Summer Hustle,” and Weiss then prompted it to create a colorful graphic to promote the program.
Weiss also showed mayors how the tool could be used to prep for community board meetings, by asking the AI to generate possible questions from community members, including follow-ups.
Some mayors who said they’ve already played around with generative AI tools said they’ve used it to anticipate town hall questions, summarize articles they haven’t had time to read, create draft job descriptions or draft responses to constituents.
CNBC agreed not to quote individual mayors who participated during the event, which was marketed as a place where mayors could come to learn and freely ask questions about a new technology.
More than 100 mayors attended Bloomberg CityLab’s Mayors Innovation Studio to learn about using artificial intelligence in city government.
Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
The mayors also heard from several cities already deploying or thinking about the use cases of generative AI in their cities.
The city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for example, is working on a generative AI model based on ChatGPT with its existing Boti chatbot that residents can text with using WhatsApp. The new generative AI version of Boti is trained to discuss culture and tourism — topics Melisa Breda, undersecretary for evidence-based policies, said they determined to be relatively low risk. Still, the tool hasn’t rolled out yet as Breda said it still needs fine-tuning to ensure its responses fit their criteria.
Boston’s Chief Information Officer Santiago Garces shared the city’s basic guidance to its employees for using the technology: review any outcomes, disclose the use of AI and don’t input sensitive data. Garces said such guidance should weigh the risks with the opportunity for employees in different parts of the government to experiment with it to determine how it can make their jobs more efficient.
Garces also said Boston is exploring how to use generative AI to translate information into specific regional dialects to help enroll residents in services.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University announced at the session a new City AI Connect platform, where city staff could continue to share ideas and resources on using AI in their governments.
The event sought to give mayors a starting point for how to think about implementing generative AI into their processes.
“We were hearing … oh my god generative AI, everyone’s talking about it everywhere,” said Anderson. “We understand it could mean a lot for local government. We have no idea where to begin.”
Mayors who spoke with CNBC around the event recognized the potential of generative AI to solve problems in ways that weren’t previously possible.
More than 100 mayors attended Bloomberg CityLab’s Mayors Innovation Studio to learn about using artificial intelligence in city government.
Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
“This is not a trivial thing,” said Chattanooga, Tennessee Mayor Tim Kelly in a phone interview ahead of the event. “If we can get this right and people can use AI to better access city services, I think it could move the needle.”
Kelly imagined that AI could help residents become more connected to their local governments, by surfacing open board seats that match their interests or simply making it easier for them to get information about recycling.
Columbus, Ohio Mayor Andrew Ginther hopes the technology can someday be used to better predict natural disasters and areas of high traffic accidents as well as streamline the process for residents to obtain government benefits for food.
“There’s great promise with AI really to help us transform local government operations and service delivery,” Ginther said. “We think it’ll allow us to help for better frontline decision-making, more real time information … We think those efficiencies are going to save city staff time and money and we think there are going to be dramatic improvements in resident customer experience. But we’re also going to have to invest in it.”
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in an interview after the event, envisioned that AI could help the city identify forgotten and contradictory laws on the books, so they could work on clearing unnecessary regulatory hurdles for things like housing.
“We can’t approach it from a place of fear,” Breed said of AI. “It’s coming whether we want it to or not. The question is, are we going to move with it and stay ahead of it to a certain extent, or are we going to fall behind and get run over? … My hope is that we don’t get to that place where we allow this technology to run away from us.”
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Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
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