As Hawaii’s civic engagement is at a crossroads, let’s use AI for good

The Hawaii State Water Resources Management Commission meeting in September 2023 lasted a full 12 hours and 22 minutes. Three-quarters of them (about nine hours and 30 minutes) included emotional testimonies about water management on the island of Maui.

While this meeting comes at an extraordinary moment, coming just over a month after last year’s deadly wildfires on Maui, it also reflects a deeper challenge we face when it comes to public engagement.

The volume of potential engagement makes it virtually impossible to support the kind of active and meaningful citizen participation that many, particularly the Kanaka Maoli, have fought for over the past few decades.

While Hawaii is a leader in promoting civic engagement in many ways, such as with the Legislature’s award-winning public access room, widespread public participation poses challenges. For example, neighborhood councils, planning committees, administrative agencies, legislative committees, etc. hold regular meetings in which the public can participate.

These organizations also publish information about their activities on websites, social media and newspapers. As a result, much of what government does gets buried under an avalanche of transparency.

And decision makers face their own limitations.

Sometimes their apparent insensitivity to the needs and desires of communities may be due to their own preferences or biases, but other times decision makers may not be able to process all the information they receive.

So while connectivity is critical in a democracy, it also creates real constraints and jeopardizes the good work of everyone.

As experts on public participation, public administration, and public policy, we observe this trend with concern. That’s why over the past year we have been working with other scientists at the University of Hawaii Manoa and organizations around the world to explore how generative artificial intelligence can be used to expand and improve the way citizens, decision-makers and other stakeholders engage in policy development.

Our goals are to facilitate citizen participation in planning and policy development processes, to increase citizen awareness, and to make it easier and more efficient for decision makers to process public input.

Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT are rapidly spreading across all sectors of society. These tools are designed to handle large volumes of unstructured data, such as raw transcripts of public meetings, not just from a single meeting but from years of meetings.

They can be used to categorize and summarize information received by the public from surveys and in response to social media campaigns, integrating it with other valuable data obtained from engagement activities. In short, they are uniquely positioned to address the specific challenges to democratic engagement that we discussed above.

But they are not without their limitations. In our initial tests, we learned that AI is better at processing some data than others. Formal public hearings are carefully planned events, making them more suitable source material for these tools.

Civil Beat opinion writers are closely following efforts to bring greater transparency and accountability to state and local governments—in the Legislature, at the county level, and in the media. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to [email protected].

However, differences in the work of different boards and agencies complicate matters, and free public workshops present another layer of complexity that we have yet to overcome. And the methods of sharing data between agencies, for example in PDF format, are not always optimal.

Moreover, these practical concerns sit alongside debates about the ethical use of AI and our collective concerns about its intended and unintended consequences.

We cannot address these practical and ethical issues in a vacuum, so as a first step we call on Hawaii’s leaders to engage in a statewide discussion, including agency officials, elected officials, members of the press, researchers and citizen advocates, on the use of AI in government.

Critical topics should include which applications of AI are important to government and worthy of our investment, how to defend against practical and ethical threats, and identifying the political and bureaucratic changes needed to make it all work.

When used wisely, AI can add value to civic engagement institutions and government operations overall.

Not only will it be able to increase the levels of engagement we saw in September 2023, but it will also help our decision makers process public engagement in a meaningful and faster manner.

However, this requires leadership from all stakeholders and a clear path forward.