When a top city official said Fresno was being held \u201ccaptive\u201d by private companies and their proprietary software, she meant it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The surprisingly candid conversation took place in public during a budget hearing last month when Councilmember Miguel Arias began prodding for answers on how much the use of artificial intelligence is costing the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI suspect that AI is going to be like meth,\u201d Arias said at the June 8 budget hearing. \u201cThey give it to you at a really cheap price on day one, and then they’re going to rob you and rape you on year two because now we’re on the hook.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few moments later was when Fresno City Manager Georgeanne White laid out how the City of Fresno is captive to the private companies that create software, programs and tech that are crucial to the city\u2019s core functions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don’t have those standalone products anymore that you just upload \u2014 we\u2019re stuck,\u201d White told Fresnoland in a later interview. \u201cWe’re stuck because then what happens is if you don’t keep your product updated, then they stop servicing them, they stop updating them. We are trapped to a certain extent, and it just becomes the standard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in the mid-1990s, White recalls a time when she didn\u2019t want to switch to Microsoft Word \u2014 which was new and swiftly gaining popularity at the time \u2014 after using WordPerfect for so long<\/a>. She must\u2019ve been the last person at Fresno City Hall still holding onto the older word processor, White told Fresnoland, until she couldn\u2019t keep using it while everyone else had already moved on.\u00a0<\/p>\n She views today\u2019s emergence and use of artificial intelligence in a similar way. With where technological advances are going, she said it doesn\u2019t feel like there\u2019s much of a choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re either going to have technology or you’re not,\u201d White said. \u201cWe’re going to have to have technology and so we are captive \u2014 we’re absolutely captive.\u201d<\/p>\n This dilemma isn\u2019t unique to the City of Fresno. It illustrates a wider, societal impact that the emergence of artificial intelligence has had, yet another one on top of how it could affect the future of labor<\/a>, or the environmental impacts of AI data centers on water<\/a>, energy<\/a> and even the cost of phone and computer parts like RAM<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The inevitability of AI \u2014 or at least the sense of it \u2014 has reached Fresno\u2019s local government. City employees have been using AI products for work purposes for years. Fresno City Hall doesn\u2019t have any formal policies establishing guardrails for how AI can and cannot be used.\u00a0<\/p>\n Additionally, city leaders \u2014 especially most members of the Fresno City Council \u2014 don\u2019t appear to be aware of how much the use of artificial intelligence at the city actually costs. Even fewer have an understanding of how AI impacts the way people think and solve problems \u2014 something researchers are barely making a dent in right now.<\/p>\n So many Fresno city employees were using OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT that the company reached out to city leaders, putting them on notice to pay for an enterprise subscription or stop using it entirely, White told Fresnoland.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s when Fresno City Hall blocked the use of ChatGPT \u2014 specifically its domain address on city servers \u2014 and instructed employees to instead use CoPilot built into Microsoft Office as an alternative.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although there\u2019s no formal policy regarding AI use at Fresno City Hall, White emphasized that there\u2019s an informal policy in place already, and its just a matter of formalizing it into an administrative order.\u00a0<\/p>\n While talking about needed guardrails, White brought up a recent legal embarrassment<\/a> at an outside law firm representing the City of Fresno.<\/p>\n \u201cYou see what’s happening in the courts system, where lawyers are getting tripped up and sanctioned, right?\u201d White said. \u201cIt happened to us with one of our outside counsel using an invalid citation that was likely taken from AI<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Fresnoland obtained a city memo that lists two dozen different programs that city employees are allowed to use, which either include AI features or are entirely AI products. The memo lists projected costs for some of them, but doesn\u2019t list actual costs in past years.\u00a0<\/p>\n A city spokesperson told Fresnoland that the actual cost of AI programs, including Claude AI tokens, are not readily available.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the memo, the City of Fresno projects spending about $25,000 on Madison AI, a software that drafts internal staff reports, over the next fiscal year. They also anticipate similar costs for using the AI built into Salesforce, and also Wordly AI, which provides live transcription and Spanish translation during city council meetings.\u00a0<\/p>\n But in terms of Claude AI, which is used by the city\u2019s Information Services Department, its projected costs aren\u2019t clear because it depends on usage tokens that have a separate cost. City staff didn\u2019t list any projections for how much usage tokens would cost over the next fiscal year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fresno police officers use AI built into Axon\u2019s body cameras and software to draft police reports. Although there\u2019s no separate cost associated with the use of those AI features, the city\u2019s $18.3 million contract with Axon<\/a> is a demonstration of how costs can pile up with private companies providing software and equipment that the city is beholden to.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although the first year of the city\u2019s five-year contract with Axon<\/a> costs $1.2 million, the third year of the contract is triple that and the fifth year will serve the city a much larger $5.8 million bill.<\/p>\n Is AI really inevitable? Or is it a choice?<\/p>\n As investments in AI proliferate, a burgeoning AI safety field has been sounding an alarm, calling for caution over the last couple years. It\u2019s composed of scientists, engineers and researchers who\u2019ve formed a coalition, urging tech companies to grapple with the consequences of the technology they\u2019re developing before releasing them to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n Top employees and executives at OpenAI have even resigned from their posts<\/a>, in protest of the company\u2019s attitude toward developing AI tools responsibly as well as its own transparency, accountability and documentation, among many other concerns.<\/p>\n David Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal who studies AI, has been among the most vocal<\/a> AI safety advocates<\/a> in the last year. In 2025, he founded Evitable<\/a>, a nonprofit organization aimed at discouraging uncritical development of AI programs and technology that could have much worse consequences than what the field has already witnessed \u2014 some of which he outlined in The Guardian<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Krueger told Fresnoland that AI poses security and privacy threats, can at times hallucinate, expeditiously agree with users in what\u2019s referred to as sycophancy and spit out information built on gender, political or other kinds of biases.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s why setting clear policy on how AI is used in the workplace is important, Krueger said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s vitally important for governments to have policies on AI use, both to protect their constituents and for transparency,\u201d Krueger told Fresnoland, adding that those kinds of policies should have ideally come first, before government employees began using AI for work or professional purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n He shared with Fresnoland that an AI policy should include keeping a record of all the ways AI is being used, bar any AI products that may leak private data or train data based on what\u2019s inputted into its system. He also said a policy needs to ensure that employees are aware of the potential for AI hallucinations and sycophancy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Krueger also shared a sobering outlook on current AI advancements: \u201cOn the current trajectory, AI will increasingly automate decision-making at every level, and take human decision-makers out of the loop. This is very dangerous and could lead to humanity losing control of our destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n He said it is a choice to adopt AI technologies and workflows, but it\u2019s also a choice to move away from them \u2014 something a few major companies have done recently. Back in May, Uber announced it had burned through its AI budget for an entire year by April, and its COO said the money it spent on AI services was getting harder to justify, according to Business Insider<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The multi-billion-dollar corporation\u2019s executive specifically said although Uber\u2019s tech workers were using AI more than ever before, it wasn\u2019t translating to better features or experiences for customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n That same month, Starbucks canceled an AI inventory tool that it rolled out to thousands of stores across the country after it frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, according to Reuters<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n