AI Technologies Aren't Just Destroying Federal Records – They’re Also Creating Them
Microsoft's Copilot AI technology is creating Federal records with no human oversight or transparency. Over time, this could change the very nature of our government.
The Federal government uses many different complex AI technologies for a host of unique requirements. But Microsoft's Copilot - a repackaged version of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 series of large language models implemented on Microsoft's enterprise information management platform, M365, and Azure cloud environments - is far and away the leader in Federal government AI solutions.
Copilot is a solid, sophisticated AI technology, with a long list of impressive capabilities.
Some of these capabilities include:
Summarizing long email threads
Taking notes during a meeting
Creating a summary of a Teams meeting
But from a government records management perspective, these capabilities create new, troubling concerns. For the first time in our history, machines will be creating original agency records, and they will be doing it without human intervention or transparency into the key decisions that the AI made to determine the content of the record.
Within a year or two, this will change the basic philosophies of our federal agencies and could become a threat to our Constitutional Republic. Here’s why.
As an example, let’s use Copilot’s capability to create a summary of an agency Teams meeting. The idea behind this feature is similar to an Executive Summary in an official agency report: provide a short overview of the most important matters discussed and decisions made during the meeting, while leaving out the minor details that management might not have the time or resources to deal with.
Sounds helpful, right?
But how does Copilot decide which discussions in the meeting were the most relevant, what participants’ comments were the most important, and what participants’ comments could be left out?
These kinds of AI decisions are made in algorithms based on the information used to train it and the program commands in the code used to create it. In closed source AI solutions like ChatGPT-4 and Copilot, these algorithms are black boxes, completely indecipherable by anyone other than their original creators. (And, sometimes, not even them.)
All humans have internal biases. They have been part of our DNA for thousands of years and helped protect us from threats. So, let’s hypothetically consider the possibility the original creators of Copilot’s algorithms had negative biases toward anyone who didn’t include their pronouns in their Active Directory profiles (to which Copilot would have access), and trained Copilot’s algorithms to highlight the comments and decisions made by Teams meeting participants who included their pronouns in their profile, while generally dismissing the comments and decisions made by participants without pronouns in their profiles.
This would fundamentally alter the narrative in the AI generated Teams meeting summary in favor of one group of participants over another without any way of ever knowing it had happened. Worse still, as Copilot continued to produce more and more of these biased meetings summaries - as well as other documents, like email summaries, press releases, conference agendas, and meeting notes - these biases would begin to steer the agency’s entire philosophy in the direction trained into the AI algorithms and the influence of Copilot would continue to grow exponentially. And eventually agencies will develop policies based on input entirely generated by machines.
Clearly, not something our Founding Fathers ever intended.
The definition of a federal record, as amended by the Obama administration in 2014, is “all recorded information”. These AI generated electronic documents certainly qualify as Federal records. This means the law requires that they are rendered immutable to ensure authenticity and integrity and preserved in secure, compliant records repositories either at the originating agency or the National Archives and Records Administration, where they will become part of our nation’s historical legacy…without anyone knowing they were created without any human input or meaningful agency transparency.