A county in Kentucky conducted a month-long “town hall” with nearly 8,000 residents in attendance earlier this year, thanks to artificial intelligence technology.
Bowling Green, Kentucky’s third largest city and a part of Warren County, is facing a huge population spike by 2050. To scale the city in preparation for this, county officials wanted to incorporate the community’s input.
Community outreach is tough business: town halls, while employed widely, don’t tend to gather a huge crowd, and when people do come, it’s a self-selecting pool of people with strong negative opinions only and not representative of the town at large.
On the other hand, gathering the opinion of a larger portion of the city via online surveys would result in a dataset so massive that officials and volunteers would have a hard time combing through and making sense out of it.
Instead, county officials in Bowling Green had AI do that part. And participation was massive: in a roughly month-long online survey, about 10% of Bowling Green residents voiced their opinions on the policy changes they wanted to see in their city. The results were then synthesized by an AI tool and made into a policy report, which is still visible for the public to see on the website.
“If I have a town hall meeting on these topics, 23 people show up,” Warren County judge executive Doug Gorman told PBS News Hour in an interview published this week. “And what we just conducted was the largest town hall in America.
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The prompt was open-ended, just asking participants what they wanted to see in their community over the next 25 years. They could then continue to participate further by voting on other answers.
Over the course of the 33 days that the website was accepting answers, nearly 8,000 residents weighed in more than a million times, and shared roughly 4,000 unique ideas calling for new museums, the expansion of pedestrian infrastructure, green spaces and more.
The answers were then compiled into a report using Sensemaker, an AI tool by Google’s tech incubator Jigsaw that analyzes large sets of online conversations, categorizes what’s said into overarching topics, and analyzes agreement and disagreement to create actionable insights.
At the end, Sensemaker found 2,370 ideas that at least 80% of the respondents could agree on.
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One of the most striking things they found out in Bowling Green was that when the ideas were anonymous and stripped of political identity, the constituents found that they agreed on a lot.
“When most of us don’t participate, then the people who do are usually the ones that have the strongest opinions, maybe the least well-informed, angriest, and then you start to have a caricatured idea of what the other side thinks and believes. So one of the most consequential things we could do with AI is to figure out how to help us stay in the conversation together,” Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green told PBS.
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Source: A Kentucky Town Experimented With AI. The Results Were Stunning
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