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The September 2023 meeting of the state of Hawaii’s Commission on Water Resource Management lasted a whopping 12 hours and 22 minutes. Three quarters of which (around nine hours and 30 minutes) included emotional testimony regarding the management of water resources on Maui.

While this meeting occurred during an extraordinary moment taking place just over a month after last year’s deadly wildfires on Maui, it is also reflective of a deeper challenge we face when it comes to public engagement.

The volume of potential engagement opportunities makes it nearly impossible to support the robust and meaningful citizen engagement that many, especially Kanaka Maoli, have fought for over the last several decades.

While in many ways, Hawaii has been a leader in promoting civic engagement, such as through the Legislature’s award-winning Public Access Room, voluminous public participation poses challenges. For example, neighborhood boards, planning committees, administrative agencies, legislative committees, and more hold regular meetings in which the public can participate.

These entities also publish information about their activities on websites, on social media, and in newspapers. As a result, much of what the government does is being buried in an avalanche of transparency.

And decision-makers face their own limitations.

At times their apparent unresponsiveness to the needs and desires of communities may be due to their own preferences or biases, but at other times, decision-makers may be unable to process all of the input they receive.

Thus, while critical in a democratic society, engagement opportunities also pose real constraints and threaten the good work of all.

As experts on public participation, public administration, and public policy, we have watched this trend with alarm. This is why over the last year, we have been working with other scholars at the University of Hawaii Manoa and organizations around the world to study how generative artificial intelligence might be used to expand and improve how citizens, decision-makers, and other stakeholders, engage in policy-making.

Our goals are to facilitate citizen participation in planning and policy-making processes, create a better informed citizenry, and make it easier and more efficient for decision-makers to process public input.

Generative AI platforms, like ChatGPT, are spreading rapidly across all sectors of society. These tools are designed to process large amounts of unstructured data, like raw transcripts from public meetings, and not just from one meeting but across years of meetings.

They can be used to categorize and synthesize public input from surveys and in response to social media campaigns, integrating it with other valuable input gathered through engagement activities. In short, they are uniquely equipped to address the specific challenges to democratic engagement we outline above.

But they are not without their limitations. Through our initial trials, we are learning that AI handles some data better than others. Formal public hearings are highly choreographed affairs, which makes them better inputs for these tools.

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Variations between how different boards and agencies operate, however, add more complexity, and freewheeling community workshops represent another level of complexity that we have yet to tackle. And the ways agencies share data, such as via PDFs, is not always optimal.

Moreover, these practical challenges sit alongside debates about the ethical use of AI and our collective worries about its intended and unintended consequences.

We cannot resolve these practical and ethical questions in a vacuum, so as a first step, we are calling on Hawaii’s leaders to convene a statewide conversation, including agency officials, elected officials, members of the press, researchers, and citizen advocates, on the use of AI in government.

Critical topics should include which applications of AI matter to the state and are worthy of our investment, how to guard against practical and ethical threats, and identifying the policy and bureaucratic changes necessary to make it all work.

When used thoughtfully, AI can add significant value to the institutions of civic engagement and to the business of government more generally.

Not only could it facilitate the level of engagement we saw in September 2023, but AI could also help our decision-makers process public participation meaningfully and more rapidly.

To do so, however, it is incumbent on all stakeholders to exercise leadership and chart a clear path forward.