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Cascade PBS reporting prompts “Civic Assembly” in Snohomish County
By Nate Sanford
AI is rapidly evolving, and many local governments are still struggling to catch up and figure out how — or if — they should be using it. In Snohomish County, local leaders decided to try an experiment.
They convened what’s known as a “civic assembly” of 29 randomly selected county residents to deliberate on AI and come up with policy recommendations.
The idea was prompted in part by a series of articles published by Cascade PBS and KNKX last summer. Using thousands of pages of chatlogs obtained through public records requests, we reported on how city officials in Everett had experimented with AI tools like ChatGPT for a variety of tasks.
That reporting raised questions about transparency. It also caught the eye of local leaders in Snohomish County.
“That reporting actually was the thing that kicked off this civic assembly on this particular issue.” said Jillian Youngblood, the director of Civic Genius, the group facilitating the civic assembly.
Civic Genuis is a national nonprofit that’s worked on civic assemblies before in other areas. But this is the first one Youngblood is aware of about AI. The Snohomish County Council says they’ll take the recommendations produced by the group seriously and try to adopt them into law.
Over three weekends in May and June, the group of 29 citizens heard from experts, did research and debated the thorny ethical issues at the heart of AI.
“Humanity needs to be put before technology, and that’s just not happening,” said participant Jessica Rhodes.
“It’s these three weekends that are intense, but my hope was to give something great to the county council government,” said participant Theo Moriarty.
“To be part of something that is so new to Snohomish County, and be part of something kind of historic,” said participant Hillary Moralez.
All this week we’ll hear more from those participants and others about the process, and tell you about the AI questions it surfaced.
