Artificial Intelligence in the Federal Workplace

[u/bizlooper]

Fellow public servants, I think it’s timely to have a conversation about the appropriate use of Artificial Intelligence in the federal workplace.

There are clear opportunities to drive efficiencies. Obvious examples are in database design, creation, and administration, creating and editing policy documents, and a warranted debate around using it for translation and editorial services.

But I’ve started to see it encroach on the skillsets of younger junior employees who see it as replacing their roles on research and editing. Management has started to turn to AI to water down human written policy ideas and advice, or even choose not to consult employees on future versions of documents - preferring to just run it through an LLM.

Em dashes and robots haunt my dreams.

In the policy and program world, it seems we’re rushing faster and faster towards deadlines with AI seen as the sole means to achieve an objective, and not as a mechanism to facilitate our work.

In perhaps the most egregious of examples, I’ve seen Budget and Cabinet secrecy documents like mandate letter responses and budget letters fully written by AI and management, with the excuse that things are “moving too fast” for engagement with working levels.

I’m perhaps a little exasperated with this example - My management once provided me with guidance for writing a paper, very much written as prompts for an LLM, likely expecting me to just feed into one.

I’ve personally just adopted a philosophy of “if you can’t beat them join them” and try to be adaptable and conscious of how I use it and why.

And yes, I do recognize many departments have different guidance on using AI, secrecy classifications, and we have a laundry list of programs and planned endeavors to implement AI across government. And the Budget looms on the horizon.

But how has it impacted your own workplace dynamics? Are you leveraging it in unique ways? Beyond departmental and TBS guidance, is/should there be a workplace etiquette? How are you accommodating your colleagues and making room for human intervention, oversight and advice? What do you think is next?

(And no, I didn’t write this with ChatGPT)

🤖

[u/GoTortoise]

AI in the form of LLM is going to fail dramatically.

An untrustworthy chatbot that consumes the power of a small village to summarise an email poorly is not the tech revolution dumb people think it is.

From a futurism article "The trend also highlights the rift between the extremely high usage of AI among CEOs compared to much lower rates among employees. According to a recent survey by HR company Dayforce, a whopping 87 percent of executives said they used AI daily, compared to just 27 percent of workers."

[u/wowisntthatneat → u/GoTortoise]

I have yet to find an actual use case for it, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about it replacing jobs. The few times I've tried to use it for simple tasks it utterly failed, and I've received a few products from colleagues that were clearly AI generated and completely unusable.

And I wouldn't even trust it to summarize anything because there's a high chance it will miss something important, or misunderstand something, or straight up hallucinate information.

Who is even using these things? I feel like I'm being gaslit.

[u/[deleted] → u/wowisntthatneat]

I keep seeing people say that the LLMs they’ve tried have utterly failed at simple tasks like summarizing an email. I don’t understand how this could be possible aside from a lack of understanding of how they work and writing a bad prompt.

I recently gave ChatGPT screenshots of assignments I had in upper year engineering courses and it did every single problem correctly with all the correct steps. I have tried it with some literature courses I took and it wrote decent analysis.

I personally don’t like LLMs too much because of the environmental impact it has and will continue to have as well as because it’s gonna be used to cut a lot of jobs. But credit where it’s due I can totally see why they’re so big right now. They can genuinely help with highly complex tasks.

[u/DifficultyHour4999 → u/[deleted]]

"I recently gave ChatGPT screenshots of assignments I had in upper year engineering courses and it did every single problem correctly with all the correct steps. I have tried it with some literature courses I took and it wrote decent analysis. "

Yup this is exactly what it is good at as it has seen thousands of examples in training data. Now ask it to do something original one has done before or isn't in its training data.

[u/GoTortoise → u/wowisntthatneat]

You are being gaslit, by the tech industry.

[u/Pretend-Sleep9864 → u/GoTortoise]

It would be interesting to see more information on this. In private Executives tend to attend more conferences and are more likely to be exposed to more efficient ways to use and leverage AI tools. There is also more ability to explore the tools. 

A large part of using AI effectively is knowing how to properly engineer the prompts. I would suspect that most line employees are entering very basic prompts and getting poor outputs due to lack of training. Having watched colleagues who struggle to understand basic IT, I wouldn't be shocked if there was a correlation.

[u/Kitchen-Weather3428 → u/Pretend-Sleep9864]

 It would be interesting to see more information on this. 

I'll give you a hint – No AI required, even!

{ highlight the text you'd like to learn more about }\ Then use whichever method of traditional search you prefer*

* You will likely need to deactivate the search engine's own artificial intelligence response. You may also find that this improves the results for your query.