Maine towns are experimenting with AI without policies

After reading through a pile of resumes, Town Manager Anthony Wilson mentally ranked the people trying to become Winthrop’s general assistance administrator.

Seeking a second opinion, he turned to ChatGPT. He fed the job description and resumes into the artificial intelligence platform and asked it to rank the candidates. It produced a similar list. The person both Wilson and ChatGPT had ranked number one was eventually hired.

“I would not have relied fully on AI to make those sort of decisions, but it did help to confirm that I was analyzing those resumes correctly,” he said.

Generative AI systems and other specialized tools are helping businesses and governments accomplish a growing list of basic and complex tasks. Officials across Maine, which has hundreds of local governments that often struggle with staffing, are beginning to experiment with it despite few policies to guide them amid questions about accuracy, bias and data privacy.

Without clear policies, officials have significant leeway in using AI, according to Justin Cary, a lawyer at Portland-based law firm Drummond Woodsum serving on a state task force assembled by Gov. Janet Mills to make recommendations in the policy area.

“At all levels of government… there are very murky expectations around how to use artificial intelligence technology when a policy is not in place,” he said. “The implications of that often aren’t considered.”

The Maine Municipal Association, an advocacy group for cities and towns, is drafting a model AI policy for members. Winthrop is further along than most, with town councilors considering a set of proposed regulations from Wilson that would bar the use of sensitive information.

For now, town officials there are using it to sharpen emails and other written communications, but Wilson said he thinks it could eventually help with more complicated tasks like budget analysis.

Camden uses specialized AI tools to monitor road conditions and may begin using it to assist with data analysis for property revaluations. It uses ChatGPT to draft meeting minutes.

While Camden’s select board has not passed regulations, the town has a detailed set of guidelines in place barring employees from using generative AI without approval. The guidelines designate low, medium, and high-risk uses, each of which has its own approval process.

Low-risk tasks include summarizing and translating documents and require department head approval. High-risk uses include hiring and policing uses; these would require formal policies to be adopted by the select board. For now, Camden’s guidelines specifically prohibit certain functions like predictive policing and fully automated service decisions.

“Everything has to stop and start with a human,” Town Manager Audra Caler said. “The ultimate responsibility is always going to lie with the human whose job it is to perform whatever task.”

Camden is not the only town relying on internal guidelines rather than policy passed by elected officials. Several towns have brought in specific AI tools with narrow purposes. They generally have not passed specific AI use regulations.

Caribou and Brewer have used Placer AI, a location-tracking system, to gauge the popularity of events and inform marketing. The controversial technology has largely been governed by its own terms and conditions, rather than specific municipal policies.

Other towns are using AI tools for policing. At a sparsely attended town meeting in July, residents of the Kennebec County town of Oakland voted to buy AI-powered body cameras from the company Axon that can generate police reports based on recorded audio. Officers are meant to check and sign off on the AI-generated reports.

Oakland Town Councilor Dana Wrigley said the town council did not set any specific rules to require that checking process, leaving regulation up to the police department. 

Lewiston is also preparing to use Axon’s technology, but it already has a policy governing AI generation of work documents.

While some towns are eager to try out new tools, others are waiting to see what problems early-adopting communities encounter, Kate Dufour, a lobbyist for the Maine Municipal Association, said. But she encouraged towns to get on board with AI, and Wilson is helping lead Winthrop into being an early adopter.

“It is coming, and so we need to be prepared to use it in a way that helps us to deliver public services both more effectively and more efficiently,” he said.

Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural politics as part of the partnership between The Maine Monitor and the Bangor Daily News, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.