PennsylvaniaGPT Is Here to Hallucinate Over Cheesesteaks

Pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to use ChatGPT Enterprise, Governor Josh Shapiro announced Tuesday, leading a pilot program with OpenAI in which state employees will use generative AI. Governor Shapiro says Pennsylvania government employees will start using ChatGPT Enterprise this month to help state officials with their work, but not replace workers altogether.

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“Generative AI is here and impacting our daily lives already – and my Administration is taking a proactive approach to harness the power of its benefits while mitigating its potential risks,” said Governor Shapiro in a press release.

ChatGPT will initially be used by a small number of Pennsylvania government employees to create and edit copy, update policy language, draft job descriptions, and help employees generate code. After the initial trial period, Governor Shapiro’s office says ChatGPT will be used more broadly by other parts of Pennsylvania’s government. However, no citizens will ever interact with ChatGPT directly as part of this pilot program.

The enterprise version of ChatGPT has additional security and privacy features from the consumer product, which has drawn criticism for security bugs in the last year. Companies like PwC, Block, and Canva have been using OpenAI’s service for much of the last year, and they’ve developed tailored versions of ChatGPT to help with their daily operations.

“Our collaboration with Governor Shapiro and the Pennsylvania team will provide valuable insights into how AI tools can responsibly enhance state services,” said Opean AI CEO Sam Altman in the same press release.

Pennsylvania is the first state to deploy ChatGPT with government-sensitive materials, creating the ultimate stress test of OpenAI’s security measures. The pilot is seen as a test run for other state governments. One major consideration for Pennsylvania is ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate or make up bits of information when handling sensitive government policies.

For the purpose of this article, we asked ChatGPT about its stance on an important question to many Pennsylvanians: Which Philly cheesesteak is superior? ChatGPT was split between the two famed rivals, Pat’s and Geno’s, at first, but ultimately decided that Pats is the best contender based on originality.

Screenshot: ChatGPT

Governor Shapiro’s office did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Pennsylvania is in many ways, an obvious choice for partnering with OpenAI. Governor Shapiro signed an executive order in September to allow state agencies to use generative AI in their work, and the state is home to Carnegie Mellon, whose researchers have paved the way for AI research.

The pilot program with the Pennsylvania Commonwealth is a strong vote of confidence for OpenAI as it heads to court with The New York Times over copyright infringement. If OpenAI loses, its GPT models built with NYTimes training data, which is most of them, would have to be scrapped. It seems Governor Shapiro does not consider that a major threat to working with OpenAI.

Amid this pilot launch, OpenAI is also on the cusp of releasing its GPT Store this week. The store has the potential to make generative AI a more significant part of many more people’s lives. Pennsylvania appears to be getting in front of that wave.