PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Board members at the Foothills Club West HOA say they used artificial intelligence when writing new parking policies, a decision that led to an overflow crowd of angry homeowners at Thursday night’s meeting.
The board rescinded the policies after the backlash, and the board president said mistakes were made in the process, including trusting AI to write the new rules.
How the AI-generated rules went wrong
Board members admitted that artificial intelligence was used during the process when creating the new parking policies.
Richard Lake, a Foothills Club West HOA board member at-large, said the AI-generated document expanded from a dozen points to multiple pages.
“If you don’t have any input, we’re going to get slammed,” Lake said.
Why AI requires human oversight
“This is shockingly common in law,” Sean A. Harrington said.
Harrington is the director of the AI and Legal Tech Studio at ASU. He says organizations can use AI to help create policies, but only with the right oversight.
“At crucial decisions where people are making real decisions that are going to impact the lives of others, a human is very carefully reviewing the output, all of it, and then evaluating it, and then, you know, editing it, if necessary, and then going forward with it,” Harrington said.
That didn’t happen here, and it’s a warning for this board and any elected official before using AI to govern.
AI expert Andrew Maynard says artificial intelligence isn’t perfect, and everyone must treat it that way.
“I would never say don’t use AI, but I would say think about what you’re trying to achieve. And in a situation like this, almost definitely the human approach without AI would have led to something better, more robust,” Maynard said.
The Foothills Club West HOA board president says he’s learned his lesson from this situation, and the board plans to make public and community input a priority when creating new policies.
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