How does the EU AI Act affect municipal communications and text production?

01AI does not take the communicator's responsibility

Municipal communications often sit on a small team's shoulders, while expectations from residents, media and stakeholders are huge. AI sounds like an appealing answer to the rush. At the same time, many municipalities are trying to work out what the EU's new AI Act actually allows and what it forbids.

Let us make one thing clear at once. The regulation does not ban the use of language models in text production. It calls for transparency, safety and human judgement. The same line shows up in what the transparency requirements mean for communications in practice.

If a communications team's ideas, decisions and drafts have previously been bounced around in Slack, Teams and email, bringing AI in turns that chaos into a risk. When AI is used, the origin of published text and the approval chain have to be verifiable. That is why communications tools have to support an editorial process.

02A human is still the editor-in-chief

Made with AI

AI can draft, but a human always makes the publishing decision and checks that the substance is correct.

The EU regulation emphasises the human role. In English the terms are often "human-in-the-loop" and "editorial review". In practice this means that AI must never publish anything independently in the municipality's name.

In municipal communications, specialists produce a great deal of information about decision-making, vitality and services. AI can help spot message pillars in a long set of minutes, turn officialese into a resident notice people can understand, and draft social posts. The final check of the substance, and the publishing decision, is still always made by a human.

Technology does not remove the communications professional from the process. It handles the routine, so the communicator has time for strategic work and for genuinely reviewing the content.

03Security is more than where the data sits

In public administration, security and GDPR are under a magnifying glass for good reason. When AI is used in municipal communications, you have to be certain that customer or organisation data is not used to train open language models. The same tension shows up in what happens to company data when a communications team uses ChatGPT.

Texts made with generic AI tools can speed up one person's work, but they often lack organisation-level control. That is why it is not enough for everyone to buy their own licence for the service they happen to prefer.

Safe everyday communications work needs a system where:

• The organisation's shared data is isolated and protected.
• AI requests use Zero Data Retention settings: the model provider does not keep the prompt or the response after the request for its own purposes. Lyyli stores workspace content to deliver the service.
• Access rights and workspaces can be managed with clear roles.

Made with AI

In the public sector, security is governance: separate workspaces, roles and documented AI routes belong to the same whole.

ZDR applies to inference processing on the AI route, not to content stored in the workspace. Model-specific processing regions and subprocessors have to be disclosed openly. That is why a European approach to AI in communications is, for municipal communications, a question of trust, not only a technology choice.

04How does Lyyli bring control back into communications?

Lyyli is not a text generator. It is a communications management system. It is built for exactly the need that the EU AI Act and municipal everyday work now create.

Lyyli brings the organisation's communications strategy, brand guidelines and workflow into one place. When a specialist starts writing a notice, Lyyli's AI automatically uses the municipality's actual tone of voice and goals in the background.

Most important for the rules, Lyyli's Professional plan includes a built-in approval process and an audit trail. The system keeps a clear record of how the content moved into review, who commented on it and who made the final publishing decision. That makes it straightforward to demonstrate editorial review, and it solves the problem of comments and versions disappearing into email.

Lyyli does not make municipal communications perfect. It makes them possible.

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