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Category: 
All Content > Technology & Innovation Reporting > Mid Atlantic

Title of entry: 
Government’s adoption of AI

Issue or Publication date:
Jult 26; Aug. 3; Aug. 31; Oct. 13; Oct. 20; Nov. 7

Publication name: 
FedScoop

Publishing/parent company: 
Scoop News Group

View Website home page:
https://fedscoop.com/

Description of the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

The U.S. federal government has set out to lead in the adoption of artificial intelligence to develop global norms and demonstrate the responsible use of the technology. Since the Trump administration, the White House has provided executive mandates on how federal agencies should use AI technology and be transparent with the public when doing so. And more recently, the Biden administration in 2023 issued a landmark executive order further cementing the nation’s leadership in AI and compelling private and public sector organizations to be safe, secure and trustworthy in developing and using AI algorithms.

AI use case inventories are required of many federal agencies — except the Department of Defense, those in the intelligence community, and independent regulatory agencies — under a Trump-era executive order. Those inventories must be posted publicly and annually, though how agencies have responded to the order and guidance from the Federal Chief Information Officers Council — which is led by OMB officials — has varied in the first two years.

Why is this so important? AI has the potential to transform government operations and services but also carries immense risks, which the American public deserves to be made aware of. Understanding this, FedScoop dedicated a significant portion of its coverage in 2023 to the federal government’s AI adoption and developments — how agencies are innovating with it, the potential perils they face and the tension between the two.

Key to that reporting has been the close watch of FedScoop reporters Madison Alder, Rebecca Heilweil and Caroline Nihill of what AI technology agencies have enlisted, how they communicated that with the public as required by law, the decision to embrace or shun innovative commercial tools, and the risks they take on in doing so.

For instance, Heilweil found the FAA in place of contradiction when, in July, the agency said it wasn’t using the popular generative AI tool ChatGPT despite listing it as a use case on its public repository of AI tools. Her story moved the FAA to update its inventory.

This was a common occurrence where FedScoop often noticed errors in federal agencies’ public AI inventories through deep sourcing and public records requests. This culminated in a series of pieces later in 2023 in which Alder and Heilweil spotlighted the messy state of agency AI inventories and that, in some cases, agencies weren’t totally sure what they were using.

Eventually, because FedScoop turned up the heat with its dogged coverage, the White House came to the publication offering an exclusive interview with one of its top AI experts on how it would fix the issue and improve inventories by issuing updated guidance.

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Entry URL(s), if applicable:
Please enter a URL that will direct judges to the entry: 
https://fedscoop.com/the-government-is-struggling-to-track-its-ai-and-thats-a-problem/
Additional URLs, if needed:
https://fedscoop.com/faa-says-it-does-not-use-chatgpt-in-any-systems/
https://fedscoop.com/ai-inventories-more-central-under-white-house-guidance/