Artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten a lot of bad press recently. From the explosion of data centers and their impacts to the recent story of an AI engineer leaving Anthropic because he was afraid AI had the capacity to wipe out the human race, many people have grown understandably uneasy about the prospects. Nonetheless, I would call myself 90% exhilarated and 10% terrified about its promise. For me, personally and professionally, it has been a productivity turbocharger and I know I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
As I’ve written before, we’ve launched what we call the “Uncampaign” for Bedford Town Supervisor, a campaign that leans heavily on AI tools to get the job done at a fraction of the cost of a normal campaign. Our total budget is $50. We’ve used AI to, among other things, build our website, organize information, do research, and create idea generators. We’ve even developed an “Ask Don” system after loading reams of articles, columns, and previous campaign information.
One of our goals is to use the campaign as a civic laboratory to demonstrate how these technology tools can drastically lower the cost and complexity of running for office with the hope that more people will be tempted to throw their hat in the ring. Good for democracy, right?
But our second goal, perhaps the most important goal, is to leave behind a set of tools that all our towns could and should adopt. We have already used AI to reorganize the town code to make it explainable for the non-geeks out there who don’t have the time or interest in sifting through hundreds of pages written in legalese to understand the ground rules for erecting a fence on their property or having a chicken coop. They can use the tool to ask questions in plain English and get the answers they need. AI does an incredible job at distilling information and organizing it into something usable.
What passes for transparency in most towns is posting a 300-page PDF of the town budget and asking you to figure it out. Simple AI tools give us the opportunity to make those 300-page PDFs understandable. Why not ask plain language questions about the budget and get plain language responses? Our towns have spent years digitizing documents. AI gives us the tools to finally make them understandable.
A few years ago, I used to represent a company called OpenGov that was in the business of government transparency. They sold software to cities, towns, and counties to help make public information more understandable. The company is thriving now with the rise of AI. One of the tools they sell is the online checkbook. It’s the rage in Texas, where the law requires much more financial transparency than most states. Using those tools, you can ask any question about expenditures and revenue in plain English. How much are we spending on consultants? What vendors receive more than $100,000 per year from us? How do our legal expenses this year compare with last year? If you can think it, you can ask it. And every answer would link back to the actual transactions.
Want to build a deck or do an addition? Open a bakery? Currently, you’re forced to translate normal life into bureaucratic language. Why not an AI expediter that explains the permits you’ll need, the required documents, the steps, fees, departments to visit, and the likely inspections you’ll need? Why should you have to expend shoe leather when the process could be streamlined and automated?
The Uncampaign is a huge fan of “explainer” videos that make complex topics and meetings digestible. Using a tool known as Notebook LM, we can load YouTube videos, documents, research, and just about anything as sources, and ask it to build a five-minute video walking us through the who, what, where, and why of a topic or meeting. It makes long, boring meetings more interesting and digestible. Maybe residents are actually interested in what the town board does and just don’t have the hours to sit through the meeting. Want to see an explainer video about this column? Watch it below.
Our towns are big on hiring consultants. AI can rediscover the information that already exists and perhaps lower that cost. It’s been said, a consultant is someone who charges you a lot of money to look at your watch to tell you what time it is. Maybe towns using AI wouldn’t need as many of them.
But here’s what AI should not do. It shouldn’t make decisions, make policy, replace public hearings, or secretly produce official decisions. It shouldn’t be a substitute for accountability on the part of elected officials. The public should always know when AI is involved. We take the step at the Uncampaign of showing our work, sources and exactly how AI was used at every step along the way. AI can sort, summarize, organize, and check punctuation, but humans do the deciding.
The goal is not to build an AI town. The human element of decision-making, leadership, judgment, and vision must be distinctly human. But AI can help make local government better, faster, cheaper, and more effective at serving the people who pay for it.