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Ensnared by Enchantment

I'm writing this piece after reading Hetan Shah's excellent article in The New Statesman, AI will not magically solve our public services and contributing to a short discussion thread on Bluesky, which by the way is one of the many reasons why Bluesky feels like Twitter did 10+ years ago, which is a good thing.

I should preface this by saying first I don't have a view on Tony Blair, and we're already doing at lot with AI where I work, from predicting where potholes will appear, to using a translation service developed by Swindon Borough Council which is saving tens of thousands of pounds a year, to drafting things like job advertisements, which I use as evidence that I'm certainly not against the use of AI in the public sector.

Hetan's piece neatly summarises the hype. It also describes from where that hype might be emanating, the lofty expectations and risks of using AI in the public sector, and what the public sector should be using AI for right now.

Amongst the many statements that rang true with me is this

there are considerable dangers of locking in to a provider that you cannot leave, as they run the platform for your services.

This is of course of true of any provider, and anyone who remembers why the majority of the world used Internet Explorer for a time when arguably Netscape and then Firefox were far superior will understand this.

I recently spoke at Public Service Data Live, which probably should have been titled Public Sector AI Live, and whilst it was encouraging that the phrase I heard most from contributors was "human in the loop", what I'm most concerned about is the outsourcing of decision making to big tech.

I'm concerned that some councils are already using AI in an unstructured and unmeasured way.

I'm concerned that already decisions are being automated (albeit at a low level) through the use of AI.

Whilst I don't have an issue with a simple algorithm enacting policy with, to use that phase again, a human in the loop to (at the very least) sample that decision making, I suspect in all cases it's not.

One you let AI provided by one of the major vendors make unchecked decisions, however trained or fine-tuned that large language model is, effectively you're handing control over to big tech.

Given the cost savings the use of AI can bring, it'll then be very difficult in-source that decision making and make the case to employ more humans to replace technology. So as Hetan says, let's automate the repetitive and the mundane of which there's plenty in the public sector, before we automate decision making.

What's certain is the AI genie is out the bottle, let's make sure we make the right wishes with it.



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