give testimony at Tech Commission

[lianilychee]

TESTIMONY

Liani testimony

Kevin testimony

Members of the CTTC board, Thank you for speaking with myself today on behalf of EFF-Austin, and thank you as well for listening to Liani from Open Austin, whose remarks we have just heard. I would like to both agree with the issues she has raised with you and build on them further. EFF-Austin is a local digital civil liberties organization, and we advocate on numerous issues relating to how technology interfaces with its users and affects their rights to free expression and privacy. We are delighted that the City of Austin has recently been taking the topic of regulation around Generative AI seriously, and has already included us in a number of the ongoing conversations related to the drafting of these regulations. We are pleased at the direction of the initial draft of these recommendations, and want to make sure that these conversations continue. Places of concern that have been raised among our members and the community at large revolve both around two central issues. One, it is unclear if the recommendations will purely remain just that, recommendations, as opposed to a binding ordinance of some kind. We understand that overly broad regulations would hamper the ability of individual departments to set their own standards and do their jobs effectively, and we agree with this reasoning, but, at the same time, there are certain high-risk uses that it would be nice to set a baseline of some kind around, such that said rules must be followed by all departments. And second, while the initial regulations offer guidance for employees using Generative AI, and said guidance is necessary and appreciated, what many citizens are concerned about and lack clarity on is what regulations will eventually govern public-facing uses of this technology. It is our understanding that most city departments don’t have immediate plans to roll out Generative AI in ways that would directly interface with the public, such as official city announcements and media, services chatbots, grant evaluations, etc., and we welcome this slow and cautious approach. That being said, we think it would be great to be starting these conversations and crafting these rules now, as it’s much easier to build in protections as far as preventing things like the misuse of citizen’s personal data now as opposed to later. We hope that our testimony today has sparked your own interest in continuing these conversations with us, and that those of you at CTTC, as well as other relevant departments like CTM, etc., would like to collaborate with us further in the continued evolution of figuring out how these final regulations and ordinances should look. Thank you for your time, and I’m happy to take any questions if there are any.

NOTES

Gave testimony at 9/10 board meeting - recording and notes

[lianilychee]

closing, we gave testimony at the 9/11 CTTC meeting