Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee will give her first State of the City address tomorrow, taking stock of her accomplishments over the past six months and the challenges facing Oakland locally and from the federal government.

This morning, Lee’s office sent a heads-up to reporters about Tuesday’s 3:30 p.m. speech at City Hall. Atop the press release was an image of the seat of Oakland’s government — one clearly generated by artificial intelligence.

Immediately, journalists in our newsroom, who’ve collectively spent hundreds of hours at meetings and interviews in City Hall, noticed some key elements missing and fabricated in the image of the Beaux-Arts building.

We could list those elements here, but we’re not going to.

Instead, we’re inviting our readers, who are passionate about Oakland, and its history and built environment, to let us know what differences you can identify between the AI picture and a photograph taken by former Oaklandside photojournalist Amir Aziz.

Update, Oct. 20: Announcing the winners!

Oaklanders Andrew Danish and Tone’e Tipton used their eagle eyes to spot about 30 discrepancies each between the AI-generated image of City Hall and the photo of the real thing.

Graphic designer Danish loaded the pictures on a big screen: “Every time I’d walk by, I’d notice something different.” City Hall is a “beautiful building,” he said — one he’s quite familiar with since his daughter attended Oakland School of the Arts nearby.

“There’s gotta be so much stock available for that building, even a vintage postcard,” he said about the city’s choice to use an AI image.

Tipton thought the AI picture was “hilarious” but said the choice to use something “cartoony is unfortunate, especially with the state Oakland’s in.” A social services provider, Tipton works near City Hall and has attended numerous protests and cultural events in the plaza.

She scoured the two pictures “from top to bottom” to spot differences.

Feel free to consult other real images of City Hall — or, better yet, attend the State of the City address Tuesday and check out the building, and our local government in action, up close and in person.

If you’d like to participate, fill out the form at the end of this article by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 8. The person who can name the most discrepancies will win an Oaklandside water bottle.

Justin Phillips, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the use of the artificial City Hall image was “definitely an outlier.”

“We don’t normally rely on AI for content or graphics, particularly in media advisories,” he said. “Moving forward, we’re going to stick with regular images.”

Governments around the world have been scrambling to figure out the most effective and least risky uses of AI as these tools have become widely available to the public over the past couple of years. These technologies can offer efficiency and information to under-staffed, tightly strapped agencies, but raise questions around accuracy, transparency, privacy, and environmental impact. 

The city of Oakland has been working for over a year on plans for AI use that will be released soon, Deputy City Administrator Joe DeVries told us. We’ll be reporting in more depth on these efforts.

Interim guidelines for city staff have already been in place since last December. These guidelines establish processes for review before new tools are used, and prohibit the input of city data, and correspondences that identify personnel or Oakland residents, into AI tools.

The guidelines also require city staff to cite any use of AI in public information, though today’s news release didn’t include such a disclosure.

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