ChatGPT helps write this mayor’s speeches. Now he wants a thousand city workers using AI

FILE - San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, right, discusses California Gov. Gavin Newsom's, left, proposal to build 1,200 small homes across the state to reduce homelessness, during the first of a four-day tour of the state in Sacramento Calif., Thursday, March 16, 2023. Photo by Rich Pedroncelli /AP

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Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points.

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“Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture.

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Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley’s biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology.

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Mahan said adopting AI tools will eliminate drudge work and help the city better serve its roughly 1 million residents.

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He’s hardly the only public or private sector executive directing an AI-or-bust strategy, though in some cases, workers have found that the costly technology can add hassles or mistakes.

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“The idea is to try things, be really transparent, look for problems, flag them, share them across different government agencies, and then work with vendors and internal teams to problem solve,” Mahan said in an interview. “It’s always bumpy with new technologies.”

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By next year, the city intends to have 1,000, or about 15%, of its workers trained to use AI tools for a variety of tasks, including pothole complaint response, bus routing and using vehicle-tracking surveillance cameras to solve crimes.

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One of San Jose’s early adopters was Andrea Arjona Amador, who leads electric mobility programs at the city’s transportation department. She has already used ChatGPT to secure a $12 million grant for electric vehicle chargers.

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Arjona Amador set up a customized “AI agent” to review the correspondence she was receiving about various grant proposals and asked it to help organize the incoming information, including due dates. Then, she had it help draft the 20-page document.

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So far, San Jose has spent more than $35,000 to purchase 89 ChatGPT licenses — at $400 per account — for city workers to use.

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“The way it used to work, before I started using this, we spent a lot of evenings and weekends trying to get grants to the finish line,” she said. The Trump administration later rescinded the funding, so she pitched a similar proposal to a regional funder not tied to the federal government.

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Arjona Amador, who learned Spanish and French before she learned English, also created another customized chatbot to edit the tone and language of her professional writings.

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With close relationships to some of the tech industry’s biggest players, including San Francisco-based OpenAI and Mountain View-based Google, the mayors of the Bay Area’s biggest cities are helping to promote the type of AI adoption that the tech industry is striving for, while also promising guidelines and standards to avoid the technology’s harms.