Rich Gagnon, City of Amarillo chief information officer/Photo by Noah Dawson

Amarillo City Council has voted unanimously to approve the creation of an artificial intelligence “digital human” that will live on the city’s website.

According to Rich Gagnon, chief information officer for the city, behind the project, the city will “start revamping the entire website” to make it “conversational.”

Shortly after the item was passed, Gagnon spoke to members of the media about the project, where he noted that, as far as he is aware, Amarillo is the first local government to take on a project like this. “I think we’re the first city in the country anyways, that’s doing this,” said Gagnon. “Commercial organizations are already doing this in the private sector, we’re just the first to look at that technology and apply it to local government.”

Gagnon also spoke about the risks of “hallucinations.” According to AI experts, hallucinations are situations in which artificial intelligence makes assertions not supported by their training data. (Or, as Gagnon put it, it’s when an AI model produces “absolute nonsense.”) When asked about how the city plans to mitigate this problem with its digital human, Gagnon stated the city is aspiring to have a hallucination rate of “two or one and a half” percent. He noted that a part of mitigating the problem is teaching the city’s artificial intelligence to say “I don’t know.”

During the council meeting, Gagnon spoke to the council about data privacy with the system. “It’s not going to see customer data. It’s not going to have sensitive data.”

Ahead of the meeting, the council regularly spoke of the planned item during budget workshops, noting how the system could offer cost savings in the future as some customer interactions are able to be automated.

The contract for the creation of the digital human is with Dell Technologies and will cost the city up to $582,948.89.