For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.
It’s literally just a document search for their internal employees to use.
Those employees are fallible humans trying to navigate tens of thousands of byzantine technical and regulatory documents all published on various dinosaur platforms.
AI hallucination is a very popular thing to get outraged about right now but don’t forget about good old fashioned bureaucratic error.
My employer implemented AI search/summarization of our docs/wiki/intranet/JIRA systems over a year ago and it has been very effective in my experience. It always links to the source docs, but it permits natural language queries and can do some reasoning about the contents of the documents to pull together information across a sea of text.
Nothing that is mission critical enough to lead to a reactor meltdown should ever be blindly trusted to these tools.
But nothing like that should ever be trusted to the whims of one fallible human, either. This is why systems have protocols, checks and balances, quality controls, and failsafes.
Giving employees a more powerful document search doesn’t somehow sweep all that aside.
But hey, don’t let a rational, down-to-earth argument stand in the way of freaking out about a sci-fi dystopia.