Pennsylvania Is First State to Pilot ChatGPT for Government Operations – The Messenger
The Keystone State is getting on the chatbot bandwagon.
Pennsylvania became the first state government to sign up for ChatGPT Enterprise, Governor Josh Shapiro announced on Tuesday.
“Generative AI is here and impacting our daily lives already – and my Administration is taking a proactive approach to harness the power of its benefits while mitigating its potential risks,” Shapiro said in a statement.
Starting this month, Pennsylvania will roll out the chatbot in a limited capacity at the Office of Administration. State employees participating in the pilot program will receive coaching on using the tool. The expected tasks the chatbot could help with include modernizing outdated policy language to make it more accessible, finding and fixing duplicated or conflicting language amid the voluminous amounts of employee policies and optimizing recruitment efforts with job postings tailored to target talent.
The overarching goal is to assess ChatGPT's ability to boost productivity and efficiency at scale across coding, writing, and administrative functions. The feedback from the pilot program will go into further tweaking its use and future role in the state’s government.
The business-only iteration of ChatGPT has additional layers of cybersecurity compared with the public model. OpenAI will not use any of the data put in by Pennsylvania employees to train its models, and the state promises not to transfer data between different agencies. The state prohibits employees from inputting any personal data that could, for example, enable identity theft or unfair profiling, of its citizens.
Shapiro said the state already has a good handle on innovation and using generative AI “responsibly and ethically.” The administration has already established a Generative AI Governing Board — which recommended the pilot program — and partners with leading AI universities in the state. In September, Shapiro signed an executive order to allow state agencies to use generative AI in their work.
OpenAI announced the enterprise version of ChatGPT in August. Earlier testers included PwC, Block, Canva and Estée Lauder. The enterprise edition features more security and privacy, runs faster and can be tailored for individual business needs.
