The September 2023 meeting of the Hawaii State Water Resources Management Commission lasted 12 hours and 22 minutes. Three-quarters of that (about nine hours and 30 minutes) included emotional testimony regarding the management of Maui’s water resources.

While this meeting came at an extraordinary time coming just over a month after last year’s deadly wildfires in Maui, it also reflects 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 past few decades.

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

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

And decision makers face their own limitations.

Sometimes their apparent lack of responsiveness 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 the information they receive.

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

As experts in public participation, public administration and public policy, we have watched this trend with alarm. That’s why, over the past year, we’ve been working with other researchers at the University of Hawaii Manoa and organizations around the world to study how generative artificial intelligence could be used to expand and improve how citizens, decision makers and other stakeholders, get involved 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 rapidly spreading across all sectors of society. These tools are designed to process large amounts of unstructured data, such as raw transcripts from public meetings, and not just from one meeting, but over 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 information collected through engagement activities. In short, they are uniquely equipped to address the specific challenges of democratic engagement that we describe above.

But they are not without their limitations. Through our initial trials, we find 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 councils and agencies operate, however, add more complexity, and free community workshops are another level of complexity we have yet to address. And the way agencies share data, such as through PDF files, isn’t always optimal.

Moreover, these practical challenges sit alongside debates about the ethical use of artificial intelligence and our collective worries about 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 media, researchers and advocates citizens, on the use of AI in government.

Critical topics should include AI applications that 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 needed to make it all work.

When used carefully, AI can add significant value to institutions of civic engagement and the business of government in general.

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 significantly and faster.

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