As technology evolves in leaps and bounds, most governments are looking at how to regulate the software.

In Pennsylvania? They are looking at how to put the technology to use.

The Commonwealth is the first state entity to subscribe to ChatGPT Enterprise-- the premium, more security conscious version of the generative AI platform designed for large organizations.
 
“We have 150 licenses that we’ll be allocating to employees throughout the year," said Dan Egan, communications director with the Office of Administration. "Providing them with training, guidance, and support, gathering feedback from them.”
 
The Office of Administration announced the partnership with OpenAI earlier this month. Now, it will spend the year testing the best use of AI in government settings.
 
“So we look at AI, generative artificial intelligence, as being an employee enhancer," said Egan.
 
The program will test out a variety of tasks. Some will be more common practices-- can it write a press release? A job description?
 
But the state wants to push limits as well. Can AI make policy language more readable? Can it identify repetition and conflict in employee manuals?
 
“Really the purpose of the pilot is to understand how can this be used on a broader scale across our workforce," said Egan.
 
While the state is breaking records by putting this new technology to use, it has yet to pass any AI specific regulations.
 
Experts like Daryl Lim, a Jr. Chair at Dickinson Law who is also an associate of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence, are encouraging governments in the U.S. to pass AI specific regulations on things like data privacy and protection, ethical research, secure systems, and how it should operate in the public sector.
 
That does not mean the technology is unreachable by the law right now.
 
“While this is a new technology, a lot of the old laws and rules apply," said Egan. "Data privacy and data protection rules in place at the federal and state level, they still apply to this technology."
 
On questions of security, there's a reason the state picked OpenAI's Enterprise program.
 
"We’re using the enterprise version of ChatGPT because it does have additional security and privacy controls around it that the public version does not have," said Egan.
 
The State Government has confirmed that no Pennsylvanian's personal data will be entered into the program at any time during it's use as an extra level of caution.
 
There are other areas of AI integration into society that are actively being deliberated.
 
OpenAI is fighting multiple copyright lawsuits.
 
"At the moment, the generative AI techniques that we have are trained on massive corpus of documents with unclear prominence, unclear copyright protection," said Vasant Honavar, director at PennState's Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory.
 
Last November, OpenAI announced that they would handle any copyright lawsuits that come against organizations- like the Pennsylvania State Government- because of their ChatGPT Enterprise use.
 
The state sits in a unique spot to both use and grow with AI from its early stages, and create regulations to monitor that growth.
 
“It’s important going forward if these technologies are going to be used in a production setting where there are consequences-- as opposed to researchers fiddling around with it to find out what its capable of and what its limitations are-- to think through how those issues would be addressed," said Honavar.