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Last week I was lucky enough to share a stage with Daljit Rehal, Dinuka Wijesinghe, Dr. Laura Gilbert, and Yatin Mahandru at Public Service Data Live to talk about deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in government.

As one of only three speakers throughout the day working in local government it was great to be able to fly the flag for councils across the country and some of the amazing work that's happening within them.

I made the point that when compared to central government departments, councils offer a far wider range of services but at a smaller scale, which means they're perfect to act as incubators for innovation, in this case around the use of AI.

Like many I'm a firm believer that when it comes to technology, the best change is often incremental, which got me thinking about the next small step we could take to join up and accelerate the testing and deployment of AI in local government, particularly generative AI.

If you're not aware of the distinction between different types of AI, generative AI is that which is most often used create text and images, and you've probably had experience of it through ChattGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or similar.

Prompt engineering is the art of telling generative AI what role you'd like it to perform, and what you'd like it to do in that role.

It's akin programming, but using English rather than languages such as Python or JavaScript, and is why I think that the risk to people who craft words for living from AI is perhaps is slightly exaggerated. 

I suspect that these roles might become more about using generative AI as a tool to help them and others craft content, and if that's where my talents lay, I'd be actively looking at moving in that direction.

Anyway, back to prompts which can be anything from

You're a pirate. Reply to everything like a pirate would.

to

You are an assistant embedded in an intranet to answer questions related to the organisation's Social Care Policy Library.

Limit your answers only to information in the files provided and to cite the passage(s) of the document(s) used to answer the question. 

Include all references after the answer in this format: """

<h4>References</h4>

<b>【Annotation source】- Document Title Here </b>

> Exact content body of the references

"""

If you are not sure or cannot provide an answer say "Sorry, I can't answer that".

Just like traditional programming they take time to write, and a comma or speech mark in the wrong place can produce the wrong result. 

So my small step forward is to create a library of generative AI prompts to be re-used by councils and beyond; similar to an open source code library, but for prompt engineering.

It would save every council having to start from scratch when they embarked on a new use for generative AI, and the prompts could be collectively improved to produce a better result.

It's something I'll be looking at with LocalGov Digital members in the next few weeks, and if it's something you'd like to get involved with, or if you just have a view on how best to implement i I'd be interested to hear your views on this in the comments below.



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