Thousands of state lawmakers and or thousands of lawmakers across the country, rather, And their staff visited Louisville last week for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Lawmakers came to learn more about the topics affecting their constituents, including artificial intelligence.

Well, today in Frankfort, members of the Kentucky General Assembly continued that conversation with a Google representative and the commonwealth's head of I.T.. Our Jane Lefler has more on this report.

State lawmakers are looking at artificial intelligence, in part to see how they might legislate guardrails for the emerging technology.

But I can be a useful tool for government, too.

The Commonwealth's chief information officer says Kentucky.

Agencies are already using AI.

CHF is, for example, has a very large application that uses generative air that tracks the usage on their self-service portal to identify where users are spending much of their time to indicate where there might be having difficulty with the portal.

And then they use that to make future enhancements.

Another agency is using a policy bot that helps staff access policies in natural language versus sort of standard policy language.

The state has acquired 30 different AI tools.

So the opportunities for use anywhere there's a high volume, repetitive administrative or analytical work that generally requires low judgment will be the opportunities to leverage.

A co-chair of Kentucky's Aid Task force hopes these tools can cut down on backlogs and fraud in Kentucky's unemployment system.

Nationally, we've seen an uptick in unemployment insurance claims.

The markets have kind of appeared to cool off, and there are some that think we're headed towards a recession.

Is the Commonwealth prepared for that?

Are we going to be able to possibly utilize this?

Is it being looked at or discussed?

Being discussed every every day?

Okay.

We will constantly push to find those kind of enterprise solutions.

A rep from Google says he's helped states with that exact thing.

Such as offering a virtual agent to answer the phone.

It's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It can speak pretty much any language on the planet within reason and train new ones if you need to.

But it does make mistakes.

And vetting someone's unemployment claim is no menial task.

It affects real people's livelihoods.

If the risk is relatively high, meaning that if this air service goes poorly, things can go poorly for a person.

Then you need to put a human in the loop.

That is one of the ways that you can prevent bad things from occurring.

Lawmakers from Lexington ask if this technology might replace workers.

I'm a lawyer by train.

That's what I am.

So, you know, we use now A.I.

in two years to do small claims cases, probate cases, name changes, landlord tenant actions, those kind of very routine and simple transactions.

In other words, it's to be a little bit funny.

Is is I two years going to be a judge, Judy?

You know, is that what we're going to see?

And in many of my conversations about job replacement, which is a big concern that people have, how do we automate too quickly?

What I what I continually ask is what makes you nervous about that?

What makes you nervous?

But the white professional, white collar jobs or robots are things.

And it seems consistent that it's the speed of implementation that makes people nervous.

State Senator Amanda Maze Bledsoe, a co-chair of the task force, introduced legislation last session to regulate deepfakes in political campaigns.

Senate Bill 131 did not make it to a floor vote.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Thank you.

June.

The Commonwealth Office of Technology creates technology and Internet use guidelines for all state employees.

The office says it's working on a policy for use that should be out later this year.