The Department of Homeland Security is embracing AI

As part of its plan, the agency plans to hire 50 AI experts to work on solutions to keep the nation’s crucial infrastructure safe from AI-generated attacks. Those within the federal government have rushed to form plans after President Joe Biden’s executive order issued last year that mandates the creation of safety standards for AI and its adoption across the federal government.

Washington: The Department of Homeland Security has seen the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence firsthand. It found a trafficking victim years later using an AI tool that conjured an image of the child a decade older. But it has also been tricked into investigations by deepfake images created by AI.

Now, the department is becoming the first federal agency to embrace the technology with a plan to incorporate generative AI models across a wide range of divisions. In partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, it will launch pilot programs using chatbots and other tools to help combat drug and human trafficking crimes, train immigration officials and prepare emergency management across the nation.

The rush to roll out the still unproven technology is part of a larger scramble to keep up with the changes brought about by generative AI, which can create hyper realistic images and videos and imitate human speech.

“One cannot ignore it,” Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “And if one isn’t forward-leaning in recognizing and being prepared to address its potential for good and its potential for harm, it will be too late and that’s why we’re moving quickly.”

The plan to incorporate generative AI throughout the agency is the latest demonstration of how new technology such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT is forcing even the most staid industries to reevaluate the way they conduct their work. Still, government agencies are likely to face some of the toughest scrutiny over the way they use the technology, which has set off rancorous debate because it has proved at times to be unreliable and discriminatory.

Those within the federal government have rushed to form plans after President Joe Biden’s executive order issued last year that mandates the creation of safety standards for AI and its adoption across the federal government.

The DHS, which employs 260,000 people, was created after the September 11 terror attacks and is charged with protecting Americans within the country’s borders, including policing of human and drug trafficking, protecting critical infrastructure, disaster response and border patrol.

As part of its plan, the agency plans to hire 50 AI experts to work on solutions to keep the nation’s crucial infrastructure safe from AI-generated attacks and to combat the use of the technology to generate child sexual abuse material.

In the pilot programs, on which it will spend $5 million, the agency will use AI models such as ChatGPT to help investigations of child abuse materials, and human and drug trafficking. It will also work with companies to comb through its troves of text-based data to find patterns to help investigators. For example, a detective who is looking for a suspect driving a blue pickup truck will be able to search for the first time across homeland security investigations for the same type of vehicle.

The DHS will use chatbots to train immigration officials who have worked with other employees and contractors posing as refugees and asylum-seekers. The AI tools will enable officials to get more training with mock interviews. The chatbots will also comb information about communities nationwide to help them create disaster relief plans.

The agency will report results of its pilot programs by the end of the year, said Eric Hysen, the department’s chief information officer and head of AI.

The agency picked OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to experiment with a variety of tools and will use cloud providers Microsoft, Google and Amazon in its pilot programs. “We cannot do this alone,” Hysen said. “We need to work with the private sector on helping define what is responsible use of a generative AI.”