A cash-strapped council could save money by using AI to write press releases, a councillor has suggested.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council is currently predicting a £4.1 million overspend for the year, despite receiving a £16.8 million bailout loan – largely due to children's social care costs.

Members of the strategy and resources scrutiny committee quizzed officers and council leaders on the latest financial report, with some councillors suggesting that artificial intelligence could be a way of saving money in future.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service reported earlier this year how the authority has been using AI tools to speed up the production of education, health and care plans for children with special needs.

But scrutiny committee chair Dan Jellyman believes the controversial technology has even greater potential for saving the council money.

Committee members asked for a further report on the current and future use of AI at the council.

The council's communications and marketing department is currently predicting a £105,000 overspend – officers told the committee that this is due to payments owed to the service by other parts of the council.

But Cllr Jellyman suggested that AI could be used to significantly reduce the amount spent in this area.

Cllr Dan Jellyman says ChatGPT could write council press releases 'in seconds' (image via LDRS)

He said: "When you look at marketing and communications in the budget, we could get all of that replaced with AI – a £105,000 overspend is quite a lot of money, never mind the money we pay people to write press releases when ChatGPT will do it in seconds.

"You could have one comms officer who inputs the data into an AI model and it spits it out. Many other organisations are doing that."

But Cllr Laura Carter argued that it would be wrong to replace swathes of council employees with AI.

She said: "I use AI an awful lot in my job in the voluntary sector, because we've got no money and I can't employ an admin.

"But I think there's a very fine line to tread when you start suggesting we should replace people's jobs with AI for things like marketing or communications. I think this work needs a human touch.

"There are organisations, such as funding bodies, that don't necessarily like a funding bid that's been written by an AI, because they will get overwhelmed by hundreds of bids.

"And if this happens, where will people get jobs?

"How will the Stoke pound get spent in Stoke if nobody is getting paid to do the work?"

Cllr Sarah Hill, cabinet member for finance, said that AI would eliminate some roles, but stressed the importance of retraining workers to do jobs 'that do need to be done by people'.

She said: "I've spoken to social workers who use AI to write reports.

"Anything that can be done to make some of that stuff easier and free people's time up to do person-centred stuff is great as far as I'm concerned."

David Ottewell, head of communications at the council, told the committee that his team had used AI tools for specific tasks, but suggested that human officers still played an important role.

He said: "With press releases accuracy is vitally important – you can see from the amount of sign-off our releases have to go through.

"Communications officers need to understand them in order to write them accurately."

James Doble, director of customer services, said that AI is a 'nuanced' issue that the council would need to consider 'very carefully'.

He said: "I think it's fair to say that in an environment of diminishing resources, AI is a very important tool in terms of keeping our head above the water.

"I think it's an overstatement to say that we could wipe out a complete budget heading that way."

The city council has managed to reduce its overspend from the £13.7 million predicted earlier in the year, but officers told the committee that further work would be needed to cut the deficit.