A city in Kentucky has experienced AI. The results were superb

A county of Kentucky led a one -month “town hall” with nearly 8,000 residents present this year, thanks to artificial intelligence technology.

Bowling Green, the third largest city in Kentucky and part of the county of Warren, faces a huge peak population by 2050. To evolve the city in preparation, the county officials wanted to incorporate the contribution of the community.

Community awareness is a difficult business: town halls, although used, do not tend to bring together a huge crowd, and when people come, it is a self-selection basin for people with strong negative and non-representative opinions of the city as a whole.

On the other hand, the gathering of the opinion of a larger part of the city via online surveys would lead to a set of data so massive that civil servants and volunteers would find it difficult to fight and give meaning.

Instead, Bowling Green county managed this part. And the participation was massive: in an online survey about one month, around 10% of residents of Bowling Green expressed their opinions on the changes in politics they wanted to see in their city. The results were then synthesized by an AI tool and transformed into a policy report, which is always visible for the public on the website.

“If I have a meeting of the town hall on these subjects, 23 people arise,” said Doug Gorman, director of the county judge of Warren, at PBS News Hour in an interview published this week. “And what we have just led was the largest town hall in America.”

The experience in green bowling

The county obtained the help of a local strategy company to launch a website in February where residents could submit anonymous ideas. For the survey, they used Pol.is, an open source online survey platform used worldwide for civic engagement, and for great success in Taiwan.

The prompt was open, simply asking participants what they wanted to see in their community in the next 25 years. They could then continue to participate more by voting on other answers.

During the 33 days when the website accepted answers, nearly 8,000 residents weighed more than a million times and shared around 4,000 unique ideas calling for new museums, the expansion of pedestrian infrastructure, green spaces and more.

The responses were then compiled in a report using Sensemaker, an AI tool of the Google Saw Incubator saw that analyzes large sets of online conversations, categorizes what is said in global subjects and analyzes the agreement and disagreement to create usable information.

At the end, Sensemaker found 2,370 ideas on which at least 80% of respondents could get along. Some of the most agreed ideas included the increase in the number of health specialists in the city so that residents did not have to count on services in Nashville, to reuse empty retail spaces and to add more restaurants to the north side of the city.

The online survey was able to join people that the county could not have reached otherwise like the politically disengaged or those who could not find the time of work to attend the town hall.

The format was also better to reach immigrants by offering the survey in several languages, then automatically translating the answers. This was greeted by people like Daniel Tarnagda, an immigrant from Burkina Faso and a local non -profit founder who heads a football team of immigrants under the age of 18 who find it difficult to speak English.

“I knew people wanted to be part of something. But if you don’t ask, you don’t know,” Tarnagda told PBS.

Volunteers for the project are now compiling the ideas of the report to make concrete political recommendations to the Directorate of the County by the end of the year. According to an investigation that Jigsaw conducted with local leaders, the AI saved the county on average 28 days of work.

Agreement beyond party lines

The Bowling Green experience was the first proof of a large -scale concept of Sensemaker, wrote Jigsaw in a blog article earlier this year.

One of the most striking things they discovered in Bowling Green was that when ideas were anonymous and stripped of political identity, voters found that they had agreed a lot.

“When most of us do not participate, the people who do it are generally those who have the strongest opinions, perhaps the least informed, the most angry, then you start to have a caricatured idea of what the other side thinks and believes.

Jigsaw has announced this week that they are now associating with the Napolitan Institute, a research and public survey organization founded by the famous scott Rasmussen sounder, to compile information on how the Americans of each district of the congress see the founding ideals of America, the state of the country now and where it goes. Unlike the Bowling Green experience, the objective is not a policy but to understand where the nation is located.

The potential of AI: good and bad

There are still concerns intrinsically linked to this experiment with AI in local governance. Although the Bowling Green survey website explicitly notes that “no personal information has been captured and that no demographic data has been stored”, this does not necessarily mean any future application of this elsewhere would follow the step.

Artificial intelligence is the subject of confidentiality problems because of their vulnerability to data violations, which would become a problem if people had to be done for their political convictions that they have subjected to confidence.

AI also has a problem with its creators who cook in its algorithm. Last month, the researchers found that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot would consult Musk’s opinions – rather controversial – before answering sensitive questions. If an AI should generate neutral policy suggestions, a defect as such would be insurmountable.

But if these concerns are adequately dealt with, then AI could have the potential to completely revolutionize civic engagement. And this could show a way to go beyond political polarization and to the promulgation of tangible change, similar to the way in which AI has created a space for a community divided into green bowling to find its common ground.