NSS Weekly: When AI Helps and Harms

Transcript

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INTRO: You are listening to North Star Stories: Voices from Where We Live, a newscast about what it means to live in Minnesota, produced by AMPERS, with support from the McKnight Foundation and the State of Minnesota.

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HOST: This is North Star Stories: Voices from Where We Live. I'm Gracie J.

This week, we examine the benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence and how some state agencies are putting it to use. Then, we look at the current job market and why many recent graduates and younger Minnesotans are struggling to land their first job.

But first, artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping many aspects of modern life. From your living room to state agencies, the technology is increasingly influencing how decisions are made, including at the State Capitol. Reporter Jose Ozoria examines the benefits and drawbacks of this rapidly evolving technology and how Minnesota is preparing to embrace what some are calling a new industrial revolution.
JOSE OZORIA: Hey Siri, what's today's forecast?

SIRI: Looks like it will be partly cloudy today.

JOSE OZORIA: The term AI, or artificial intelligence, has become a catch-all term for various digital tools that are changing the world around us. Generative AI is a form of AI that is revolutionizing how many industries carry out various tasks. With the use of generative AI, your phone assistant from just a few years ago is now supercharged. An AI-upgraded Siri goes far beyond basic voice commands. It now functions as a contextual personal assistant that writes messages, takes actions across multiple apps, and understands what's happening on your phone screen, seamlessly integrated with the goal of fully functioning as an assistant.

SIRI: You'll need to unlock your iPhone first.

DR MOUSUMI MUNMUN: Generative AI is a system that can create text, images, code, audio, and summarize in a way that feels so very natural to users. Another major advancement is the ability of AI system to analyze a very large data set and very quickly.

JOSE OZORIA: Dr. Mousumi Munmun is an assistant professor of computer science and cybersecurity at Metro State University in St. Paul. She points to the ways artificial intelligence creates new original content by recognizing and mimicking patterns in existing training data.

DR MOUSUMI MUNMUN: AI can help automate repetitive tasks and faster analysis of the complex information.

JOSE OZORIA: Dr. Munmun also notes that Minnesota has always been welcoming to technological advancements.

DR MOUSUMI MUNMUN: So, Minnesota has strong industries that are well positioned for AI integration, including the healthcare, manufacturing, agricultural retail, and education. Our state also has a strong higher education and workforce development system that can support responsible AI adoption.

JOSE OZORIA: Minnesota is fast becoming a testing ground for what happens when artificial intelligence moves from Silicon Valley into everyday life, and at the state level, AI tools are viewed in a positive light and are being embraced.

MICHELLE GANTZER: So each legislative session, thousands of bills are introduced, and the team here in the Commissioner's office would kind of have to dig through those bills to find the needle in the haystack to determine which ones impact the Department of Revenue.

JOSE OZORIA: Michelle Gantzer is the Director of Senior Management Operations at the Department of Revenue, or DOR. Inside a state office building in St. Paul, employees once spent hours processing paperwork manually, bills, forms, data entry. Now AI systems can process thousands of documents in minutes, reducing costs and allowing workers to focus on more meaningful tasks.

MICHELLE GANTZER: My team would start looking through each one of those bills to determine if it had an impact to the Department of Revenue. The team would spend hours. We never wanted to be in a position of why didn't we catch this sooner, why didn't we see this with how fast legislative session moves? This was the perfect opportunity to use AI to help us discover those things as quickly as possible.

JOSE OZORIA: The Department of Revenue says that with the AI system, the staff now analyzes 100 bills per minute, processing more than 6,500 bills with 99% accuracy. Andrew Giesecke is an application architect with the Department of Revenue. He says it was very easy to start using AI.

ANDREW GIESECKE: It's triggered off of the Reviser website that hosts all the bills for the legislature. We already had the cloud infrastructure in place, so we only had to use the resources that were already there available to us, and that's why we didn't have to add any new infrastructure to implement this.

JOSE OZORIA: The team responsible for the new AI system at the DOR views the early success as an indicator that AI will become more widely implemented, not only at the DOR, but throughout government agencies. But AI also brings significant concerns and dangers. Representative Alex Falconer's bill prohibiting health insurance companies from using artificial intelligence to deny medical claims and prior authorizations successfully passed in the Minnesota House. Representative Falconer testified at the House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee.

REPRESENTATIVE ALEX FALCONER: Relying on algorithms to dictate who receives care can strip away the nuanced understanding that medical professionals bring to the table, an understanding that goes beyond mere data points. AI systems, no matter how advanced, lack the empathy, compassion, and real-world experience that are fundamental to effective and personalized healthcare.

JOSE OZORIA: AI also faces a great deal of criticism for what is known as deep fake. That's when someone uses artificial intelligence to create a fake image or video. In the most recent legislative session, Representative Jessica Hanson helped make it illegal in Minnesota to use technology to make someone appear naked.

REPRESENTATIVE JESSICA HANSON: We need to ban nudification features because they allow users to create nonconsensual, unauthorized deep fakes of sexually explicit content, including child sexual abuse material.

JOSE OZORIA: Representative Hanson says, while AI can be used for good, current nudification technology has reached the state where the images produced are indistinguishable from a real image, causing great harm to victims.

REPRESENTATIVE JESSICA HANSON: These images generally end up posted to the dark web, shared on social media, exchanged for money, or worse.

JOSE OZORIA: While artificial intelligence is transforming the world around us with unprecedented gains in efficiency, data analysis, and task automation, experts and legislators also see a double-edged sword, as it simultaneously introduces significant risks related to algorithmic bias, job displacement, data privacy, and more. For North Star Stories, I'm Jose Ozoria.

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The nudification bill considered by Minnesota lawmakers this past session is one example of how rapidly artificial intelligence is evolving and how quickly policymakers are being asked to respond. To help us better understand the opportunities and risks associated with AI, we're joined by Eran Kahana, an attorney whose practice focuses on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and intellectual property law. He is also a research fellow at Stanford Law School, where he does research on AI. Thank you so much for joining us today.

ERAN KAHANA: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

HOST: So, Minnesota lawmakers recently considered legislation addressing AI-generated nude images. How will the law actually stop people from doing it?

ERAN KAHANA: Well, you can't stop people from doing it. You can criminalize the activity. The Minnesota law here is not about publication of the images, it's about access to the technology that makes that possible. So I think this is why Minnesota claims that it's the first in the nation, because states have already made laws that touch deep fakes and non-consensual intimate imagery, but what Minnesota brings to the table, that seems to be new, at least according to Minnesota, is the access. So here we're touching the, I think it's more about controlling access to websites, apps, even prohibiting advertising and promoting of the service. I think it even reaches the payment processor. So, the idea here is to really strangle, if you will, the access to the technology that enables notification in the first place.

HOST: Now, AI-generated images and videos are becoming much harder to detect. So, how are lawyers, courts, policymakers adapting to deep fakes and other forms of synthetic media?

ERAN KAHANA: The issue of generating fakes, let's not, let's take the word deep fakes. The deep fakes really is more the issue of using AI. This has been around since basically Photoshop entered the picture back in, I think it was the early 90s. So, people who wanted to create an intimate picture of somebody in a non-consensual manner could already do that. It took a lot more effort, a lot more skills. And what AI - it's made it possible, so anybody could do it without any technical skill. So, it's not really introducing anything new to lawyers or courts. This is just an issue of how do you deal with somebody that has created this, and how do you, you know, what is the remedy you provide to the plaintiff.

HOST: I know some people are comparing AI to the arrival of the internet, even the Industrial Revolution. Are we at the beginning of a similarly transformative moment, and more importantly, what opportunities and risks should we be paying the most attention to with this?

ERAN KAHANA: The comments about the Industrial Revolution and the internet, they're all after the fact. It's impossible to confidently say that this is forever changing everything. It seems likely. I will say that it's been a long time in the making, since probably the 50s. It is likely that we are seeing transformations that will really impact how we do things. Will they be forever? It depends on how good they get, and how absorbed they are in our society. The thing we need to be careful, I think, with is that there's a tendency by people to, as one court said, abdicate, basically give up our ability to think. We are just relying on the AI to do everything. And if you are careful and a good user, a diligent user of this technology, you will, at least as we speak today, you will find that it makes a lot of errors. So we have to be careful that we are not giving up our ability to think for ourselves and to use our judgment. Human judgment cannot be mimicked, at least for the foreseeable future to the level that we need it as humans, and so giving up our ability to think independently, I think, is one of the biggest dangers with using this technology.

HOST: Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with our listeners today, Eran.

ERAN KAHANA: Thank you very much.

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HOST: After the break, some recent grads are struggling to get into the job market. We'll take a look at why that is. This is North Star Stories: Voices from Where We Live, produced by AMPERS with support from the McKnight Foundation and the State of Minnesota. We'll be right back.

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HOST: You are listening to North Star Stories. I'm Gracie J.

Minnesota's economy has long been one of the most diverse in the country, with the state thriving in many different sectors. However, for lots of recent graduates and younger Minnesotans, finding a stable job is a difficult challenge. Reporter Jamad Jama has the story.

KOWTHAR YUSUF: I think it's very hard to find a job in this workforce right now. Looking for a job is very hard. I think I'm on Indeed for like two hours a day. It used to be less.

JAMAD JAMA: Kowthar Yusuf is a first year nursing student at Metro State University. Between classes, studying, and preparing for her future in healthcare. Kowthar has been struggling to find something many young people are looking for: a job.

KOWTHAR YUSUF: It's pretty hard, because you don't have that experience that gives employers the opportunity to hire you, and you're kind of just at like a gray area where you're kind of stuck.

JAMAD JAMA: That gray area is where a lot of young Minnesotans are finding themselves in a relatively stable job market but really struggling to break into the workforce. Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development, or DEED, looks at how the state's job market is changing and how job seekers' stories may vary based on experience, location, job industry, and age.

ANGELINA NGUYEN: My name is Angelina Nguyen. I am director of DEED's Labor Market Information Office, and we work very closely with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on collecting metrics that tell us more about the labor market. So things like unemployment rates, job growth, things from the worker side.

JAMAD JAMA: DEED tracks the biggest influences shaping Minnesota's labor market.

ANGELINA NGUYEN: First and foremost, I would say is our aging population. So, we have the baby boomers' generation leaving the workforce, you know, for retirement, and people are living longer. So we have an increasing need for elderly care when it comes to skills or when jobs are in demand, like health care and nursing home hospitals, those kinds of industries.

JAMAD JAMA: This information can explain deeper factors behind experiences like Kowthar's.

ANGELINA NGUYEN: You know, in general, when the unemployment rate is higher, the labor market becomes more competitive. There are more job seekers looking for work, and so employers have more options, more choices when they hire. In that context, it is tougher for younger workers, like teenage workers, recent graduates, to compete with more experienced job seekers.

AARON SOJOURNER: And Minnesota has a couple of things that are kind of unique. One thing is that our economy is really diverse.

JAMAD JAMA: Aaron Sojourner is a former professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

AARON SOJOURNER: Most states kind of specialize in one or two areas. Minnesota is one of the states that aligns pretty closely with the national economy. When one sector is affected, there's usually still opportunities in other sectors, so it insulates us a bit from some shocks.

JAMAD JAMA: Minnesota also has historically low unemployment rates, and specifically—

AARON SOJOURNER: We tend to have lower unemployment rate historically than other places, high employment share among women, higher education levels, higher pay, more than most other places.

JAMAD JAMA: But these trends don't translate into easy access to employment for job seekers today.

AARON SOJOURNER: Since the end of the pandemic, we've had a lot of job security for people who have jobs. But since about 2022, when the Fed started raising interest rates, we've seen hiring really cool. And so if you don't have a job, it's quite hard to find a job, and that especially affects young people who are entering the labor market for the first time.

JAMAD JAMA: Along with these temporary shifts, economists are also considering the impacts of AI and automation on the job market.

AARON SOJOURNER: It's not obvious that, like, jobs are destroyed as much as that jobs are reshaped and organizations sort of change the way that they design jobs. For some organizations, they're going to find good applications of this. But a lot of companies are taking resources that they might in the past have used to hire new people and instead using those resources to experiment with AI and try to figure out how can we leverage this new tool.

JAMAD JAMA: And for students with minimal experience, like Kowthar, who are already struggling to find employment, things like AI and automation are a real fear.

KOWTHAR YUSUF: Honestly, I think that it's causing more damage than help. Knowing that I want to go into the medical field, I feel like AI can help; however, it cannot take the spots of doctors, nurses, technicians. But there are a lot of people that are in that gray area of being at risk for losing their job.

JAMAD JAMA: And after struggling to find work herself, Kowthar has one message for employers looking to hire.

KOWTHAR YUSUF: I understand that people are looking for background experience, however, sometimes people cannot obtain it. And if they are to gain that background experience, I think just being more lenient and being more graceful towards this person, because it's everybody's first time doing this.

JAMAD JAMA: For Minnesotans struggling to find employment, resources and support are available on careerforce.mn.gov. For North Star Stories, I'm Jamad Jama.

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HOST: Young Minnesotans are not the only ones finding it difficult to navigate the job market this year. In recent months, Minnesota's unemployment rate has risen above the national average. To help us better understand the factors affecting employment in the state, we're joined by Dr. Tyler Schipper, Associate Professor of Economics and Data Analytics at the University of St. Thomas. Thank you so much for joining us today.

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

HOST: So, Minnesota's unemployment rate has recently risen above the national average. What is driving that trend, and what does it mean for people entering the workforce today?

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: That's something that's kind of unique to kind of our historical timeline, is that typically the unemployment rate is lower in Minnesota than it is nationally. There are some long-term factors that we've had slower growth in Minnesota and upper Midwest. There are some medium-term factors, like the overall US economy has been slowing down, and there's some very short-term factors, particularly here in the Twin Cities with Operation Metro Surge, that probably made the unemployment rate pick up just a little bit more as well. So you can kind of combine those three things to explain why Minnesota is slowing down, and that makes it more of a nuanced picture. There's no one boogeyman to point to here.

HOST: You mentioned Operation Metro Surge. Elaborate. How exactly did that operation affect Minnesota's labor market and workforce needs?

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: The biggest thing is that people simply either weren't showing up to work, and foot traffic was down in a lot of different stores. So particularly here in the Twin Cities, there was a good research report by North Star Policy, as well as we got some data on sales tax revenue that showed for places like retail and food service, in particular, there was less sales tax from those type of businesses, and that course bonded with or being less employment in those businesses in the Twin Cities. I think the harder question is, how persistent is that? That if we were in the middle of a really good economy and you have this negative shock, maybe it goes away right away. But when we're in the middle of economy that was already kind of, say, like hanging on by its fingernails, that things are just kind of static, it's harder to think that we just go back to a really good economy right away. Instead, you might see much slower rehiring by those same businesses that maybe had to lay people off because the economy is slower right now.

HOST: You know, there has been discussion about the possibility of an economic slowdown. Tyler, are the current employment numbers signaling a recession, or do they reflect something else?

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: The data that is often used for trying to say whether we're in a recession or not is often economic growth data. So, has GDP, the measure of all goods and services, been growing or not? And that data has been pretty resilient. Consumers have kept spending, and that's helped those GDP numbers stay positive on the labor market side is. Where we've had more concerns that we just haven't seen a lot of job creation, particularly here in Minnesota, and that makes it feel recession-like for lots of people. I don't think we're in a technical recession, and I think that, you know, maybe the odds have risen for a recession this year because of the conflict in Iran. But there's not red warning lights on the entire dashboard right now. Instead, we're seeing that it's hard to break into the labor market if you don't have a job, even if firms aren't doing kind of large-scale layoffs that we would expect to see if we were indeed in recession.

HOST: So, then, for someone graduating from college or looking for a new job today, what advice would you give about finding opportunities in Minnesota's current economy?

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: Where I start with this is just validating that it's not something that you've done. It's not a, it's not that you didn't do every step right along the way. You got to keep putting yourself out there, you got to keep searching, and know that in the longer term, you will find a place to land, and all the stuff you've done up to this point can also be stuff that's going to make you successful in that future career. I think there's also an element to it's going to become harder and harder for students to differentiate themselves when they go in the labor market, because everybody's using AI to write their cover letters, and so many of those cover letters look and sound the same now. So, making sure that you're investing in doing those kind of unique experiences are going to differentiate you from other students.

HOST: Well, is there anything else that I didn't ask you about that you would like to share with our listeners?

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: I'd like these type of stories where we take a metric like the unemployment rate, which is 4.3%. We say, oh, but it's, it's different in Minnesota, where it's, it's four and a half percent, and you can kind of keep going down that route and recognize that even within Minnesota, you get very different pockets of local labor markets. That there are, for instance, some of the kind of smaller towns and cities in northern Minnesota, like Virginia or Hibbing, tend to have much higher unemployment rates. Anytime you have a county that kind of intersects with some of the tribal reservation spaces, they tend to have higher county unemployment rates as well. And so local economies also give a much more nuanced picture of what the economy looks like in Minnesota, that typically southern Minnesota tends to have lower unemployment rates. Northern Minnesota tends to have higher unemployment rates. So, it depends a little bit on where you're graduating from and where you want to go into the labor market, how easy or hard that might be.

HOST: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Tyler, and sharing your expertise with us.

DR TYLER SCHIPPER: Yeah, happy to do it.

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HOST: Well, we are now looking at another job sector. Construction remains an important part of Minnesota's economy. According to CareerForce, the industry accounted for about one out of every 20 jobs. To learn more about the current state of the construction labor market, we're joined by Professor Peter Hilger. He is an architect, educator and construction management specialist who serves as Faculty Director and Senior Lecturer for the Construction Management program at the University of Minnesota. Now, construction employment faced significant challenges during the pandemic and the federal immigration crackdown earlier this year. So, how would you describe the health of Minnesota's construction industry today?

PETER HILGER: COVID basically shut down the construction industry, so nobody was working. The recent immigration enforcement did not shut down the construction industry; it merely disrupted it. So, I would say that, you know, generally speaking, our economic trends have been quite solid. What I am more worried about are the headwinds the things that have the potential right now to disrupt the industry in ways that we can't quite anticipate, things like the tariff. Nobody could make any sense of how to predict costs when you have that kind of uncertainty. Certainly, the immigration surge has had an impact. And labor productivity interest rates will have an impact, but yet we're still seeing kind of a steady state. We're not going really a lot up, we're not going a lot down, we're kind of in a steady state here in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which is actually not a bad place to be in for the consumer. The advantage to this marketplace is that sometimes you will find more competitors competing for your project.

HOST: Well, we know that technology is changing many industries. How are innovations affecting construction jobs and the skills employers are seeking?

PETER HILGER: From my perspective, the challenge of technology in the construction industry remains a slow adoption. It depends on with whom you are working. So the small home builder, no impact, you know. It's going to be the way we've always done it. For the large home builders, it's going to be yes. What can we employ? Can we do prefabrication more better, so to speak? How can we leverage artificial intelligence to help us on our pricing and scheduling models? That's already starting to take root in the commercial sector. You're seeing a lot more of that starting to happen, but it's not been a tsunami of technology overtaking, because firms still need the workers, but they're going to leverage this technology to help a lot of on the office side, on the managerial side. So the demand for technologists to run some of these systems is going to be in demand, just like the welder, just like the plumber.

HOST: Looking ahead, what does the future of construction in Minnesota look like?

PETER HILGER: I'll tell you, it looks good. The beauty of our state and our region. I've been here since 1980. I moved here from the West Coast, which was experiencing a recession due to a timber industry challenge. Minnesota, over all of these years, has been steady state, not big peaks, not big valleys. It's been steady state. The workforce has been solid, absolutely solid, both in the union and non-union sectors. The client side has been very good. We've had great corporate presence in the state, a good solid economy. Never have been at the bottom of the ranks anywhere. We have a good education economy. Everything points to having a very, very stable construction economy, along with other economic sectors within the state. All of those contribute to having a robust environment for the industry.

HOST: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

PETER HILGER: No problem.

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This is it for today's program. If you missed any part of today's newscast, you can find this and past episodes at AMPERS.org or listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You can also get North Star Stories daily on our website or check your favorite station's schedule. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week with more stories and voices from the North Star State.

OUTRO: North Star Stories is produced by AMPERS, diverse radio for Minnesota's communities, with support from the McKnight Foundation and the State of Minnesota. Online at AMPERS.org.