WAUPUN — The Waupun City Council heard from department heads about what uses there are for Artificial Intelligence at the most recent City Council meeting held Tuesday, November 12.
The topic was brought up by Library Director Bret Jaeger during his regular report to the Council. Jaeger had recently attended the Wisconsin Library Association meeting in Green Bay at which AI was a major topic of concern.
“Let me tell you, it can do great things, but it can be really scary when it comes to confidential records,” Jaeger said.
An example Jaeger described was of mammogram x-rays, which AI technology can read at a rate 30 times faster than humans and at 99.9% accuracy.
“It’s still so early, but it’s something that’s here already so you’ll have to be careful what you do with it,” he said. “Even when you do Google searches now they have assistents—which they might not say they’re AI assistants—and when you search they’re also putting together a folder on you together with your searches and keeps it to find better ways to help you.”
He said it reminded him of old movies warning about the dangers of this sort of technology.
Jaeger then asked Police Chief Jeremy Rasch if the Police Department if they had to do anything related to it particularly in relation to cybersecurity, to which Rasch said that they were looking into using it for generating reports.
City Attorney Dan Vande Zande also pointed out that different AI programs have different features, and that giving an AI your documents could lead to confidentiality breaches.
“If you take something confidential and put it into something like ChatGPT, it becomes part of ChatGPT—so someone else could access that information,” Vande Zande said. “A lot of services that are working with attorneys are saying they are silo’d so they won’t do that. So you’re exactly correct, it’s a very big concern about what happens to your information when you plug that in.”
City Administrator Kathy Schlieve also said that the City of Waupun is looking into writing specific policies when it comes to AI, particularly when it comes to open records requests.
Fire Chief BJ DeMaa also added that there was a virtual presentation by CVMIC the following day titled, “introduction to artificial intelligence and the public sector: utilization and legal considerations.”
Following the AI discussion, Jaeger reported that the library’s new study room would be delivered the following day and attached to the sprinkler system the following week. The new room can be found in the northwest corner of the upstairs fiction area of the library. The room fits no more than 4-6 people and provides a soundproof area for patrons to use for zoom meetings and a private study space.
Mayor Bishop asked Jaeger if the library had come up with anything to fill the wall previously occupied by Clarence Addison Shaler’s “Geese in Flight,” which had been returned to The Rock Golf Club on February 15. Jaeger said that they had been looking for new pieces of art to display, but so far nothing had struck them as fitting for the location.
