AI tools may also help governments understand the needs and desires of residents. The community is “already inputting a lot of its knowledge” through community meetings, public surveys, 311 tickets, and other channels, Williams says. Boston, for instance, recorded nearly 300,000 311 requests in 2024 (most were complaints related to parking). New York City recorded 35 million 311 contacts in 2023. It can be difficult for government workers to spot trends in all that noise. “Now they have a more structured way to analyze that data that didn’t really exist before,” she says.
AI can help paint a clearer picture of how these sorts of resident complaints are distributed geographically. At a community meeting in Boston last year, city staff used generative AI to instantly produce a map of pothole complaints from the previous month.
AI also has the potential to illuminate more abstract data on residents’ desires. One mechanism Williams cites in her research is Polis, an open-source polling platform used by several national governments around the world and a handful of cities and media companies in the US. A recent update allows poll hosts to categorize and summarize responses using AI. It’s something of an experiment in how AI can help facilitate direct democracy—an issue that tool creator Colin Megill has worked on with both OpenAI and Anthropic.
But even as Megill explores these frontiers, he is proceeding cautiously. The goal is to “enhance human agency,” he says, and to avoid “manipulation” at all costs: “You want to give the model very specific and discrete tasks that augment human authors but don’t replace them.”
Misinformation is another concern as local governments figure out how best to work with AI. Though they’re increasingly common, 311 chatbots have a mixed record on this front. New York City’s chatbot made headlines last year for providing inaccurate and, at times, bizarre information. When an Associated Press reporter asked if it was legal for a restaurant to serve cheese that had been nibbled on by a rat, the chatbot responded, “Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites.” (The New York chatbot appears to have improved since then. When asked by this reporter, it responded firmly in the negative to the nibbling rat question.)
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