Social Media - Public Works Group Blog

April 22, 2023April 22, 2023

Using AI to Generate Images for Public Works

globe with an image of a tree growing in the ground and birds flying and mountains in the back all in a primarily green color.

As noted in the last blog post, Can AI Help Fix a Water Main Break?, Artificial Intelligence or AI may eventually be a really useful tool for those of us working in the public works field. In this post, I’m exploring its use as a tool to generate images. This is helpful because many of us are often tasked with either developing reports, newsletters, notices, or presentations. And with copyright laws, it can sometimes be a struggle to find a non-copyrighted image we want to illustrate our writing. Some of us may be talented in creating our own graphics, but that can take a lot of time even if we have those skills.

AI can help solve many of these challenges. It can generate an image very quickly. And if the first one doesn’t quite work, we can quickly generate another one. Or we can generate a few and ask colleagues for their opinion on which is best to use.

Regarding copyright, I have seen a lot of comments online suggesting this is a problem. But a recent publication in the Federal Register by the Library of Congress U.S. Copyright Office seems to indicate at least in the United States images generated by an AI from text cannot be copyrighted. Here’s some of the findings noted in that publication:

In the Office’s view, it is well established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.
…when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the ‘‘traditional elements of authorship’’ are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.
these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output.

The publication goes on to indicate if a human takes the AI-generated image and either modifies it or uses it in a creative composition that is determined to now be developed by a human, then that final work may be considered to be copyrighted. There are instructions in the publication of how to submit for registration of copyright of an AI-generated work that a human has modified.

However, I am not an attorney and would suggest running this entire question of copyright by your own legal department for verification.

If you get the green light from legal to use AI to generate images to help you at work, your next question may be where is this magical AI tool and how do I use it? Over the past few months, I have tried some AI tools that I’ll share with you starting with my favorite one below:

Midjourney: so far this has become my favorite image-generating AI. Although at first it was a little uncomfortable for me to get used to. I still find their website a little scary when it initially comes up because they have a lot of changing text that makes me immediately think I accidently clicked a site that will hack me. Also, their website is not where their AI tool is found. Instead you join their Discord group and generate images there.

So if you are not used to Discord that may also be initially uncomfortable until you get used to the interface. Fortunately I have been using Discord for a while now so that part was not so bad for me. You can access and join Discord through the Discord website, and you can download and install the Discord app on your computer from their website. From the Discord site you can search for the Midjourney Discord server. Here is the direct link: Midjourney Discord Link which should bring up the site shown in the image below. From there you can join the Midjourney Discord Server by clicking the button which says “Join Server.”

Screenshot of the Midjourney community site on Discord

Once you get to the Midjourney Discord Server, as I said it can be overwhelming if you are not used to the interface. The quickest way to try it out is to click in the column on the left on a newbies listing in one of the Newcomer Rooms. The image below shows the result of me clicking on newbies-102. It shows a running result of the images generated by Midjourney based on text people have input.

Screenshot of the Midjourney Discord Server showing images generated by the AI tool

You can see the text inputs vary from a very simple description to more complex. Midjourney wll generate four different images for each request. You can further refine a specific image by clicking the boxes underneath. The U boxes are for upscale an image while the V boxes ask the tool to vary it. I created the image at the start of this blog post in Midjourney with the following text prompt: /imagine a scene showing nature in an earth day theme using green as a predominant color. There are a lot of sites online which offer guidance on how to use the tool, and Midjourney has a Quick Start Guide where you can get more detailed information than I have included here.

I will follow up with the other AI image-generating tools I have tried in the next blog posts.

April 26, 2015April 26, 2015

Learning New Skills at Civic Design Camp – Chicago 2015

At today's Civic Design Camp not only did I pick up a few choice bits of advice and skills to add to my civic toolbox, but I also was able to meet and network with some great people including Josh Kalov who I first met at CityCamp in Chicago back in 2010.

Introduction and First Session

The day started out with an introduction by Cyd Harrell, product director for Code for America, and Christopher Whitaker, brigade coordinator for the midwest region of Code for America. Whitaker is also a consultant for Smart Chicago and helps co-host Open Gov Hack Night in Chicago. After introductions, the discussion was turned over to Raphael Villas who was a Presidential Innovation Fellow and is now with 18F, a group within GSA providing digital services to the Federal government. Villas explained how he made the move from the private to public sector and showcased a few of the projects with which 18F is involved.

These projects include:

Communicart – an online service to assist holders of Federal credit cards with purchase approvals and tracking.

MyUSA – a single sign-in service connecting citizens with the U.S. government. The project is still in Alpha, but when finished can assist in linking citizens with any application designed to accept this single sign-on.

USCIS – 18F is working on a streamlined version of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. This new site will better direct users to the type of information they are looking for. If you visit the site, you will see it now immediately asks the user the status of their citizenship and offers possible actions or questions.

Let Girls Learn – this site provides information about the collaborative effort between the First Lady and the Peace Corps to promote learning among adolescent girls.

If you want to follow up and learn more about 18F or want to check out their code, you can visit their Github page at https://github.com/18f or their Dashboard at https://18f.gsa.gov/dashboard/.

Visual Design Basics

Next up was Molly McLeod who is with Code for America. She shared with us several good tips for making government documents, forms, and other media more user friendly. I kept thinking throughout her whole presentation how helpful it would be if the engineering industry was given more instruction in this area of study. Many engineers are tasked with preparing documents for use by government agencies, yet most have not had any formal instruction on writing or visual design. The lack of skills in these areas can cause a reader of those documents to either not even bother reading them because it is just too painful to fight through, or the lack of organization and disregard for the end user can leave the reader thinking the author lacks credibility. This lack of credibility can then translate to the government agency for which the document was prepared. So, to improve government documents, designers should always, before writing or preparing anything, answer the questions McLeod posed:

Who are your users?
What do they need to know?
What is the order they need to know it?
What are the action steps?

The next step is to make sure you are providing answers to the questions your users might have such as:

Am I eligible/is this relevant to me?
What info/materials do I need on hand?
How long will it take?
Key details: deadlines/when/where?

McLeod also offered content tips taken from the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent. And even though the information is focused on communicating information to voters, most of the tips apply to any type of instruction given in a government document. (You can check out the guides yourself by following the link.) Below is a photo of a redesign McLeod did of her county's instructions to voters. If you visit her blog post about this topic, "Let's Respectfully Redesign Government," you can learn more about this redesign and see a side-by-side comparison of her design with the original set of instructions.

Prototyping Websites using Github Pages

Cathy Deng next showed us how she uses Github Pages to prototype websites. But the added bonus in this session were the other tools she touched on that can also be used to improve or assist in creating sites. While I've worked with website development since the early 1990s and was familiar with Github, these were all tools I have not yet used so it was great to learn about all of them and see a live demo of their features. To start, Deng showed us how to easily set up a website using Github Pages. Basically all you need is a Github account. After that you can follow the directions on the Github Pages site to set up your own website through your account. Here is a link to the very basic site I set up on my own account within only a few minutes following the example: My-Website.

Deng then showed us how we can test out changes to the site's code in Codepen. This tool, which is shown in the screenshot below, allows the user to paste code into the appropriate section – HTML, CSS, or JS – and immediately preview how it will look in the browser.

The other tool she shared was Bootstrap Components. This site lists many of the items you might want to place on your website such as dropdowns, button groups, headers, progress bars, and many others. If you find the one you want, the code is listed so you can copy and paste it into the code for your site.

The last tool Deng brought into play was Font Awesome. This site, which is also hosted on GitHub, offers numerous vector icons that are scalable and can be added to your site. You can either download them and add them yourself, or you can copy and paste the code that links to the icon on Font Awesome. As the site indicates, "Font Awesome is fully open source and is GPL friendly." You can view Deng's final, simple site she coded during the presentation here http://cathydeng.github.io/my-website/ and access it on Github here https://github.com/cathydeng/my-website if you are interested in forking it over to your own account and experimenting with the code.

Civic User Testing Group

The final presentation I saw was given by Sonia Marziano who is with Smart Chicago and more specifically manages CUTGroup, a civic user testing group in the city of Chicago. Marziano explained how her group arranges testing of websites for developers. Their testing group consists of about 800 residents in the city representing all 50 wards and all 77 neighborhoods. Each participant in the group receives a $5 gift card for signing up and $20 each time they participate in a test.

If you visit the CUTGroup page on the Smart Chicago website, which is separate from the CUTGroup website, you'll find a listing of all the sites the group has tested so far along with very detailed reports analyzing the test results. Marziano was asked if she knew of developers using these results to assist in building better websites. While she wasn't specifically aware of anyone doing that, she did indicate there is enough detail in the write-ups that they could be used for this purpose and believed it would be a great use of the reports. For example, below is the final report from their testing of the Chicago Works for You Website (as an aside, if you haven't ever seen this site, it's worth clicking on over to check it out how Chicago reports their public works related service requests and to see the frequency at which those types of requests are received). I included this one because it focuses on public works related services. If you have a similar site, it might be helpful to read through the user group's reactions and thoughts about their experience with the site:

Final cut group-5-chicago-worksforyou-report from smarziano

Marziano also shared some general, overall observations from their testing such as they found very few people click on popovers and that people don't like to have to sign up to access information. She said users will do everything possible to avoid having to share their personal information. They also realized from testing that for autotweets sent to a Twitter user based on specific terms used by that person in a Tweet, it is important to include these types of elements in the autotweet:

compassion
a question
an official element

So for example, if someone sends out a Tweet mentioning food poisoning in the city of Chicago, Foodborne Chicago will send an autotweet that is similar to the following:

"@twitteruser Sorry to hear you're ill. The Chicago health department can help. https://t.co/kTBNsEJriH"

Final Presentations

I did miss the final presentations because I had to take off to get home in time for other commitments. However, based on posts by other attendees, it looks like the final presentations covered discussion about the Design Thinking for Libraries Website and gifs.

Off-line takeaways

As always in addition to the more formal presentations, I usually pick up some good stuff from others who I meet at an event. Because I was fortunate enough to sit at a table with others who are involved in the transportation industry, I learned a lot about what is going on with Chicago transportation and city business and found out about a few other websites that offer great information. Below are the sites Steve Vance, Abraham Emmanuel, and Josh Kalov shared with me:

Chicago Traffic Tracker – the benefit of this site is the regional map shown in the upper left corner. This small map gives a good overview of the congestion or traffic in an area of Chicago. It can also show how this compares to what is typical for that location and time and it can predict over a 12-hour time period how it will change.

Cook County Property Tax Portal – this site is useful if you have an address or PIN number for a parcel in Cook County. The information offered includes standard property tax information and a listing of the last few property transactions taken from the Recorder's office.

Chicago Cityscape – this site offers information about building permit and business licensing activity in the city of Chicago.

March 14, 2015March 14, 2015

Running Toilets Get Their Own 5K Race!

The EPA has been promoting Fix-a-Leak Week (March 16-22, 2015) for the past seven years. But like many issues in public works, sometimes it is difficult to drive awareness and attract people's attention to the message. Even with great social media resources and a topic that left ignored could mean a loss of money, it's still not easy for a message like this to stand out in today's constant stream of information. So some communities are taking a different and innovative approach by promoting the problem of running water with a 5K Run, and a few races will even include a running toilet.

If you manage a water system and have been looking for an idea for getting your message out about Fix-a-Leak, you can check out the races listed at the end of this post and consider organizing something similar in your own community. As the popularity of the race in Roswell, Ga., shows, your one event can end up reaching 800 people from your community. If the idea of a race is too much for your staff to manage on their own with the often limited time and resources available, you can follow the lead of Fort Worth, Texas, and partner with a local running group or club to help organize and host your run.

Many of the communities also enhance their event by incorporating social media. A few have created videos to promote their run (included with each listing below) or encouraged participants to use social media to post photos of themselves running in the race. Some of the races are themed and include a costume contest. At least one of the races offers a prize to a random person who posts on social media something they learned from the event. And others, including the one in Fort Worth, have also arranged for groups such as the EPA, local water conservation organizations, and local hardware or plumbing companies to set up information booths at the race. What better way to raise awareness, offer information, and have some fun!?

Races Promoting Fix-a-Leak Week:

Arizona

Peoria: One for Water 4-miler, Saturday, March 21, 2015

California

Santa Rosa: St. Patrick's Day 5K, Sunday, March 15, 2015

Georgia

Roswell: Water Drop Dash, Saturday, March 21, 2015

Post by Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District.

Texas

Fort Worth: Chasing Leaks 5K Run/Walk, Sunday, March 15, 2015

Plano: Chasing Leaks Fun Run, Saturday, March 14, 2015

Virginia

Charlottesville: Fix-A-Leak Family 5K, Sunday, March 22, 2015

March 16, 2014

WATERCON2014

This year I am fortunate to again have the opportunity to attend WATERCON in Springfield, Ill.It's amazing how every year the conference offers so many great sessions, and the exhibitors always have such interesting displays and information. In addition to attending sessions and talking with vendors, I'll be posting as much as I can on several social media sites so that all of you can follow as much of the conference as possible. Because most of these sites are already listed in a blog post over at the Watercon blog site, I won't list them again here. Instead I encourage you to visit over there. And if you're attending too, I'll be looking for your own posts and photos from the event!

One added treat is a virtual expo we set up to try out that technology. Here's an image of the entry screen – you can find the link to visit the expo over on the Watercon site.