Hi rulers! A quick reminder — on Dec. 12, Women Rule will be holding an event, called “Leading with Purpose: How Women Are Reinventing The World.” Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.) will joining us, along with a host of other speakers. Check out the lineup and RSVP here. Let’s get into it: New York is largely lauded as one of the most generous states for paid leave, whether it’s parental leave or taking time off to manage your own illness or care for an ailing family member. But not all New Yorkers know how much paid time off they’re entitled to, if they’re entitled at all, or even how to access it. That means some families are leaving tens of thousands on the table. Moms First, a nonprofit parent advocacy group, thinks it might be able to solve that problem — with generative AI. On Tuesday, Moms First launched PaidLeave.ai, a language model that was designed to tell New Yorkers exactly how much paid time off they’re entitled to, and help them come up with a plan to access it. It's the brainchild of New Yorker and Moms First CEO Reshma Saujani. You can ask the bot any question about paid leave in New York and it will give you a conversational, human-like response. The tool allows users to describe their unique situations, in no specific format, and based on their answers, it then generates tailored guidance. It comes as paid leave in New York remains underutilized. A study in the American Journal of Public Health, using data from 2015 to 2019, found that only 40 percent of parents who had a baby during that period took New York paid family leave. The new tool was developed to help close that gap. Saujani originally developed the idea with guidance from OpenAI — the startup widely considered to be leading the generative AI craze. Saujani told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about her idea, and he connected her with his team, which provided early guidance. Eventually, Moms First partnered with OpenAI-connected start-up Novy.ai and Craig Newmark Philanthropies to create the bot. But PaidLeave.ai differs from ChatGPT — OpenAI’s premier chatbot — in one key way, says Elias Torres, Novy.ai founder and CEO. “If you go to ChatGPT today and you ask the question ‘Hey, am I eligible?’ ChatGPT will use all the information on the internet to try to answer that question. It will use probability to try to calculate an answer. So most likely it’s going to be the wrong answer.” PaidLeave.ai, instead of being trained on the entire wealth of often outdated or inaccurate information on the internet, is only trained on official documents. “What we’ve done here is that we said ‘you must respond specifically out of this set of information from the New York State. We’re telling the AI: ‘read this PDF, and answer the question with what it says on the PDF, and tell me what part of the PDF you got that from,” Torres tells Women Rule. He says that the tool is remarkably accurate. Despite Torres’ confidence in the bot, the website still advises users to “verify PaidLeave.ai’s answers with the links it provides you, and do not rely on its responses as a substitute for professional advice.” PaidLeave.ai is one of the first applications of AI for public service — and as such, there is no charge for users. Saujani says she wanted to develop something with AI that would benefit low-income families and moms. The AI is also able to respond to questions in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. “This is going to help more women get access to benefits, which is going to boost women’s economic empowerment,” she tells Women Rule in an interview. “That’s what’s very exciting about this tool: who’s going to be using it and who it’s for.” It’s also just the start, says Saujani, who stressed that the New York AI is a model. If all goes well, Moms First plans to create similar AIs for other states — starting with the 13 that already have access to paid family leave. “We’re already talking to governors in those states,” says Saujani.
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