A shortcut to understanding Government advice on AI policy in Australia

Over the last few weeks, I have been reviewing our draft AI policy at work.  That has involved a bit of research to understand the government advice and guidelines on AI use in the government sector.

With Victoria due to release its guidance on the 16th of October (one months' time), we have pulled together a bunch of other guidelines and in my personal time I have been going over them and trying to understand how we bridge the gap between safe and secure AI use and the potential for innovative, high value solutions that hold the promise of bringing expert knowledge to every employee.

Some of the documents include:

1. Voluntary AI Standard
2. White Paper on AI Governance
3. Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006
4. Australian Government. (2019). AI Ethics Framework. 
5. Victorian Public Sector Commission. (n.d.). [Code of Conduct for Victorian Public Sector Employees]
6. Australian government Policy for the responsible use of AI in government
7. Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner. (n.d.). [Victorian Protective Data Security Framework (VPDSF)]( https://ovic.vic.gov.au/information-security/framework-vpdsf/ ).
8. Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner. (n.d.). Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014.
9. Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.  Public Statement: Use of personal information with ChatGPT 
10. Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.  Public Statement: Use of Microsoft 365 Copilot in the Victorian public sector (https://ovic.vic.gov.au/privacy/resources-for-organisations/vps-use-of-microsoft-365-copilot/ )
11. Australian Government. [National framework for the assurance of artificial intelligence in government] (National framework for the assurance of artificial intelligence in government | Department of Finance)
12. ISO definitions - ISO/IEC 22989:2022 (https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:22989:ed-1:v1:en)Victorian Data Sharing Act 2017, State Government of Victoria ( https://www.vic.gov.au/navigating-legislation-sharing-safely )
13. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). (Year). Australian AI Capability Framework. Retrieved from https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/ai/ai-ethics-framework.
14. Victorian Digital Strategy 2021-2026, State Government of Victoria, 2021 (https://www.vic.gov.au/a-future-ready-victoria/digital-strategy-2021-2026 )
15. Jones, N. (2023) What the OpenAI drama means for AI progress - and safety, Nature News ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03700-4 )
    
17. Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, David Askay, Ali Eshraghi, Preston Smith,
    Artificial intelligence and knowledge management: A partnership between human and AI,
    Business Horizons, Volume 66, Issue 1, 2023, Pages 87-99, ISSN 0007-6813,
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2022.03.002.

Making sense of all this information

Altogether, these documents cover a lot of ground and overlap considerably, so to ensure I don't miss key insights and also to share this work with other government policy writers, I decided to upload each of these publicly available documents to a custom ChatGPT to allow myself and others the ability to understand what these documents together say on each topic.

You can access this GPT via this link, or by scanning the QR code above.

Example questions

Here are a few of the questions you can ask to get your creative juices flowing:

• What are the key considerations when writing an AI framework for acceptable AI use in Australian government departments?
• Can you outline key behaviours for staff members using AI?
• Can you outline key design considerations for developers of solutions using AI technologies (particularly Gen AI)?
• How do we balance the desire for innovation with the need for security, privacy and data sovereignty?

Coming updates

Once Victorian government releases their guidance on AI in government use, I will add it to this engine so stay tuned.

Please let me know if this sort of thing is helpful and the kind of questions you asked it to help me build more of this sort of support tool in the future.