To artists’ ire, a council poster shows the hands of AI

On 26 March, Fingal County Council announced a new summer market on the third Saturday each month at Swords Castle, the heart of the town’s new cultural quarter.

Social media posts for the “family and wheelchair friendly” event came with an image of a walkway lined with stalls, piles of fruit and vegetables, half a man emerging from a kiosk countertop, no hint of a castle, and smiling young white men and women in aprons with an ambiguous number of fingers – and not a child in sight.

Dublin’s subreddit, on 3 April, denounced it as an example of “AI slop,” a poetic way of saying low-quality AI content.

After Transport for Ireland got pushback for using AI generated imagery for a promotional campaign back in October, it was disappointing to see that another public body had maybe gone down that route, says illustrator Eva Kelly.  “The image quality is poor and unmemorable.”

Illustrators, graphic designers and photographers hone their skills for years, she says. “People may say it’s for cost-cutting. But that’s not good enough.”

In this case, a spokesperson for the council said that “an approved supplier, a Fingal print designer” had been engaged to create a logo and print materials for the new market.

“As this is a new market, there was no established bank of images which could be drawn on for the design, but it is intended to capture photographs once the market commences which could be used in future,” they said.

The spokesperson was unable to get clarity from the designer as to where the image originated, and to confirm that it was AI generated.

What role generative AI should play in delivering council services in the coming years is something that the council’s digital services staff have been looking at, said Mary Egan, the director of people, corporate and digital services back in March.

Fine Gael Councillor Eoghan Dockrell says that he thinks there is great potential.  “It could make certain work streams within the council as more efficient.”

But there should be a carve out for the arts, he said. “Certainly within the arts, we should be using the creativity of local artists, as opposed to relying on AI models.

One of the challenges pointed to in a February report by the AI Advisory Council is how to handle the impact of using generative AI to produce “creative content” on artists’ income and jobs.

Testing the waters

Fingal County Council is still at the early stages of engaging with artificial intelligence, says Labour Councillor James Humphreys. “The council dipped its toes into this with Covid.”

During the third nationwide lockdown in 2021, Fingal launched a Virtual Covid-19 Assistant in partnership with IBM, to answer questions on its Community Call Response initiative and the availability of council services.

In April 2022, the council tendered a contract for the design and configuration of a Local Government Artificial Intelligence Chatbot. Although, according to the Etenders website, the council cancelled this request for tender.

More recently on 10 March, Dockrell, the Fine Gael councillor, put in a question to council officials asking how generative AI was being used.

Dockrell asked if officials had held any meetings on how it may be used in day-to-day business in the future.

The council’s digital services department is monitoring developments and opportunities in the area of new technologies, said Mary Egan, the director of people, corporate and digital services in her report.

Generative AI, or GenAI – which uses models to produce things like text, images and videos, based on the data it is fed and prompts – had the potential to reduce the effort involved in “high-volume repetitive tasks involving unstructured information such as reports, policies, submissions, etc,” her report said.

Digital services staff had attended conferences, received presentations and held “many meetings” on GenAI, Egan said.

But the council would focus on being transparent and maintaining human oversight if any AI was implemented into its work, she said.

Humphreys, the Labour councillor, says that there will eventually have to be some policy around the use of AI.

“My big concern will be around the use of AI in housing allocation, because that’s very much person to person, and you’d want a warm human-based system,” he said.

A new standard

As Humphreys sees it, the graphics for the Swords Castle Food Market are a step-up in quality compared to some previous graphics.

“Those were being done by a Canva-like programme and it was noticeable it wasn’t done by a professional company, it was done in-house,” he said.

That graphic was still done by a person, says Humphreys. “So instead of that person sitting down for three or four hours in front of Canva to mock-up, they used AI, so that was more time saving for that person. It didn’t replace that person’s job.”

Kelly, the artist, says this is a good moment to start a conversation with artists, illustrators and graphic designers.

It’s an opportunity for the government, both at the local and national levels, to make policies on using artists over generative AI, she says. “There’s a lot of hope here.”

In a February report on the impact of AI on Ireland’s creative sector, the AI Advisory Council suggested expanding the state’s universal basic income pilot for artists to include all creators affected by AI disruption.

This, the report said, could help them adapt to this new economic reality and help ensure the sustainability of creative careers.

The advisory council  also strongly recommended that financial support, like grants and tax incentives, should be provided to help creators adopt AI tools for content creation.

Local authorities should be setting out more detailed guidelines for the application of AI and its use, says Dockrell of Fine Gael.

In Dublin city, a council spokesperson said it is taking a “cautious but forward-looking approach” to any technological advancements.

Dublin City Council has established a Gen AI Governance Group consisting of representatives from departments and sections across the organisation, they said, and they have invested in a Gen AI Lab to explore use cases for council services.

But they are not currently using Gen AI in media and marketing, they said.

“We will work with our suppliers and contractors to better understand how they are using these tools and ensure that any Gen AI use is responsibly applied and correctly referenced,” they said.