A quick note from our VP of Marketing:
Thanks for using FastDemocracy. We have a lot of exciting updates happening at the company, and this newsletter is where we will share them.
Earlier this month, I stepped into my role with FastDemocracy as the new VP of Marketing, so you will be hearing from me and my team a lot more going forward. I have worked on and off with FastDemocracy over the last few years as a contractor and consultant, but now I have joined the team full time.
We want this newsletter to be valuable to you, so we would love your feedback on what you want to see more (or less) of.
— Conner Kerrigan, VP of Marketing
Avoiding AI misinformation in legislative tracking
Last month, we held a webinar with our Chief Technology Officer, Anatolij Gelimson, as he walked viewers through the failure points that large language models have when helping to track legislation. It is pretty simple: general-purpose AI is trained on the internet, and the internet is always a few steps behind active legislation. That means most popular AI models will get things like amendments and strikethroughs wrong, and can show an unhelpful bias based on op-eds and social posts about a bill.
AskAI, FastDemocracy’s plain-language search engine for bill tracking, takes a different approach, using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. You still get the plain-language explanations you expect from an LLM, but the responses are limited to primary sources, like bill text and transcribed testimony.
Anatolij does a great job of breaking down the problems and the solutions. Watch the webinar below, or read our full write-up: The Problem with Using AI for Legislative Tracking (And How We Solved It).
Local legislative tracking
This month, we rolled out local legislative tracking in three cities: New York City, NY; Denver, CO; and Baltimore, MD. If you are a FastDemocracy subscriber in any of those states, you automatically have access to local tracking in these cities. No need to upgrade or change any settings: just log in and it is there.
Want local tracking for your city’s municipal government? Send us an email and we will see if it is feasible. All of the cities we currently track were the product of user recommendations. (More on why we are investing in local: Local government is often slow and impractical. Here’s how we’re helping fix that.)
Something you can use: ask AskAI about fiscal impact
AskAI is FastDemocracy’s plain-language search engine for primary source material on legislative bills and action. All Free users get one question per day, so try this:
Pull up a bill you are tracking on FastDemocracy, open the AskAI chat window at the bottom-right of the screen, and ask: “What is the fiscal impact of this bill?”
You will get an accurate, plain-language fiscal analysis of the bill in question, easy to read and easy to share with your stakeholders.
