Shirin Delsooz is an ardent bicycle advocate and a regular feature at City Council meetings – but recently, she decided the case for bike infrastructure may be better made by an artificial intelligence avatar named Jonathan.
Delsooz, 37, has come to be known for her homemade videos promoting protected bike paths, sent to the city to be aired as part of public comment in meetings. In them, she describes the infrastructure as a way to improve the safety of cyclists and, by extension, benefit public, social and environmental health.
She hasn’t gotten much of a response to the appeals she has made to the city, Delsooz said.
So in her July video, she briefly made an introduction before debuting Jonathan – the avatar sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and donning a sporty blazer – who made the points and cited the sources Delsooz would have had she been on screen.
She’d employed the AI partially out of novelty, partially because she felt it looked more professional and would be more effective – but there was another thought, too.
“If they’re not listening to me – a person of some color and a woman – maybe they’ll listen to this guy,” Delsooz said. “I’m just experimenting.”
She is the first to employ AI in a Corpus Christi City Council meeting – and what exactly that means is unclear.
There’s no policy about using artificial intelligence as part of the public comment forum, city officials said this week.
Department staff are currently in the process of researching whether other cities have encountered AI in public comment, and also whether there may be any kind of state guidance related to it, Mayor Paulette Guajardo said on Friday.
Residents during public comment portions of municipal agendas for years have delivered messages in a range of ways, said City Manager Peter Zanoni, who previously worked in city management in San Antonio.
That has included song and the silent showing of photos.
The video still caught him by surprise, Zanoni said, but it’s not substantially different than other communication means.
“I don’t see much of a difference in an AI video versus somebody singing or somebody showing a video generated by real-life people,” he said. “All of it is subject to belief by the listener.”
The video had looked “kind of odd,” said City Councilman Jim Klein – but he had not immediately recognized it as AI.
He has some concerns about its use in public comment, Klein said – partially because he questions whether it may diminish the impact of a resident’s comments.
He noted, also, that there is current discussion on a national level on how artificial intelligence should be regulated.
“I think AI – like most any other technological innovation – is going to have some positive effects and use for good,” Klein said. “But I also think it could have some negative effects as well.”
The use of AI in public comment “represents the era that we live in,” Guajardo said.
But the idea that adopting a different appearance would influence the amount of attention the council pays during public comment time isn’t accurate, she said, adding that members of the public are treated equally.
“We do listen,” Guajardo said. “That’s what we’re there for.”
The homemade videos take about four hours to produce, Delsooz said, while it takes about one hour to produce a video using the AI website.
While she is using it as a tool for her campaign for protected bike paths – dubbed I Bike CC – she still writes all of her scripts, the same way she wrote her own scripts before using AI, Delsooz said.
The speed in which she can produce them now means she can do many more.
It means she can “annoy the City Council and staff every meeting,” Delsooz joked.
“I really, really need to make these points known,” she said. “And I have these AI videos now… they help me communicate those points.”
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