The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors today approved a policy for the use of artificial intelligence by County employees, acknowledging that the rapidly developing technology can help make government more efficient while weighing the ethical challenges that AI poses.

The policy, developed by the Sonoma County Information Systems Department, includes guidelines to protect sensitive data and ensure AI usage complies with legal standards. The policy is designed to make sure that AI is used ethically, while ensuring public transparency about how AI is used and its role in generating content. It prohibits the use of AI for decision-making or other activities that may narrow or exclude options from otherwise being considered or that could result in biased or discriminatory outcomes.

“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. “At the same time, there is a lot that we still don’t know about AI, which is why we need to proceed with caution in a secure and ethical manner.”

The policy allows County employees to use certain generative AI products, such as ChatGPT, for common 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.

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.

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.

Read the Sonoma County artificial intelligence policy here.