Lawmakers are pushing Wisconsin agencies to consider using artificial intelligence to make their work more efficient, an effort state employees and their allies fear could be used to cut the jobs of human workers.
AI has started to become an option for state and local governments, both within Wisconsin and across the country. The rise of publicly available tools, such as ChatGPT, has foreshadowed an increase in other tools designed to streamline tasks traditionally performed by humans.
Both Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Gov. Tony Evers have started task force panels to explore the use of AI in Wisconsin and come up with a framework to regulate and use the new technologies.
As part of Vos’ task force, a group of lawmakers is proposing a requirement that state agencies begin cutting positions at the end of the decade. With that in mind, the agencies would need to begin regularly updating the Legislature on their use of AI and how they plan to use the tools to make government more efficient, including trimming the size of their workforce.
That proposed bill passed the Assembly Thursday on a voice vote, meaning it is unclear how many and which legislators voted in support or opposition.
Rep. Nate Gustafson, R-Fox Crossing, who authored the proposal and chaired the Legislature's AI taskforce, said the idea was to help agencies use the tools to supplement the work of existing employees, not replace them.
As part of the proposal, the Legislature’s nonpartisan auditing arm would also have to complete a review before the middle of next year on how agencies are currently using AI.
“If we can implement (AI) alongside our current workforce, it is going to alleviate a lot of that stress that we've been seeing on our state agencies,” Gustafson said.
That type of stress isn’t news to Warren Enström, a state employee and an at-large officer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1, the union that represents most state employees in Dane County and south-central Wisconsin.
A 2023 Wisconsin Policy Forum report found that turnover rates for state agencies have reached historic levels, creating thousands of vacant positions and, Enström said, workers having to do more with less.
“This idea that the state workforce is wildly inefficient is an ideological position that's pushed,” he said. “If you look at the data, the data is showing that we are doing more with less people who are being paid less. And so, at some point, you're squeezing blood from a stone, right?”
Is AI a stress buster?
Supporters of the bill as well as state workers acknowledge AI could ease those burdens, if properly implemented.
Sally Drew, a retired state employee and president of the Association of Career Employees, a group of current and former state workers, noted that there was nothing preventing state agencies from investing in AI currently.
But she also cautioned against overhyping the possible benefit of the technologies.
"Some of these tools have already been adopted by individuals in narrow, targeted ways in their work life and some efficiencies have already been realized," Drew said in an email. "However, the early hype that they would replace the need for human workers has not been realized in any major way."
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, for instance, used generative AI to bolster its online chat tool that helps people dealing with their unemployment insurance claims. The move came after a barrage of calls for help in the fallout from COVID-19 pandemic-related delays.
A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, meanwhile, confirmed that an AI tool developed by the agency helps analyze and categorize incident reports from state prisons to make them more easily searchable.
Elsewhere in the country, similar changes are underway. In New York, for instance, county highway employees want to use AI to scan and analyze bridge inspection reports, something they argue can be done much more efficiently than if a human were performing that same work.
Wisconsin 'workforce crisis'
But the Wisconsin Assembly bill has led to objections that it could hurt state employees and the services they provide the public.
Leaders on Evers' AI task force told the publication Gov Tech that it is their goal to help train workers on artificial intelligence, rather than displace them.
Gustafson argued the point of the bill was not to shed human employees.
"Right now, we are in a workforce crisis," he said on the Assembly floor. "There are not even people to fill positions that we have. When we look at the bill here, the goal is we want to take AI, we want to augment it with our current workforce. … And ultimately say do we need to find additional bodies to fill the roles or can we continue to leverage AI to its fullest capabilities?"
But Enström pointed out that research shows AI can reinforce existing human biases, something that he said can prove dangerous when it's being used to support state services. In other cases, he said, it could just prove exhausting for Wisconsinites interacting with their state government.
“We all have experiences of calling a phone tree that doesn't have a human attached to it and how frustrating that is," he said. "Now imagine going through that trying to get your license renewed and the only human who's in the phone tree, for example, is already busy talking to the other 800 people trying to get their licenses renewed because the robot can't hack it."
Gustafson said the proposal was just the start of a broader framework, noting that many of the potential AI vendors that state agencies could use had “robust” policies to ensure ethical work.
“We want to make sure that public and private entities have the ability to kind of innovate with the use of AI,” he said. “But ultimately, we (the Legislature) will be watching.”
