Employees of Idaho’s third-largest city have access to “NampaGPT,” as they call it, a play on “ChatGPT,” the popular artificial intelligence chatbot.
In Garden City, employees have asked AI for everything from creating an anime image to designing parks.
Workers and managers have been grappling with how to harness generative AI since it burst into the spotlight in late 2022. Supporters believe the technology can increase productivity and boost the American economy. But detractors worry that AI is disrupting the job market, undermining the human experience and harming the environment. Others worry the economy is in an AI bubble.
How does AI work?
City governments in the Treasure Valley are increasingly embracing AI, such as chatbot services like ChatGPT, which are large language models. Those models work by predicting the next word in a sequence, sort of like autocorrect on steroids, according to Barrie Robison and Luke Sheneman. Robison is the director of the University of Idaho’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences, and Sheneman is university’s director of research, computing and data services…