13 January 2024 , 19:33
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Ministers are already getting AI to read documents for them and decide which are the most important, it has been revealed.
Tory minister Alex Burghart admitted he uses an experimental “AI Red Box”, developed by the Cabinet Office, to sift through the stack of papers he’s given to read every day.
And he claimed another minister is also using the experimental system, as is top civil servant Alex Chisolm.
He also revealed officials had tried to implement a chatbot to sit on top of the Gov.UK website and deal with enquiries from the public, with access to the entire database of government information.
But the experiment was scrapped when it did “some strange things” - like speaking French and being wrong a fifth of the time.
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Describing the “AI red box”, Mr Burghart told an event in Westminster: “What it does is it can read documents that go into your red box, it can summarise them, it can highlight connections between papers, connections between previous papers. And over time, as we fine-tune this model, it will become, I believe, the institutional memory of the department.”
He said that while a lot of good people pass through the Cabinet Office, “they don’t always stay that long.” “It means that things that happened three, four or five years ago, those people are not around anymore,” he said. “But with an effective AI red box, that won’t be a problem any more.”
Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney MP said: "MPs and Ministers spending time to look over casework and policy is bread and butter. If they can’t be bothered to read things for themselves, we may as well let the robots run the country. Which can't be much more worse than this Conservative mess."
Mr Burghart said his team hoped to go to the Treasury in the Spring to secure funding to roll the system out across Whitehall. The Government Digital Service tried to build a ChatGPT-style bot to act as a front end for Gov.UK - the first system of its kind in the world. But the idea was ultimately shelved.
Ministers traditionally get sent home with a red box full of papers to read (PA)“If you asked it questions in a particular way it responded in French,” Mr Burghart admitted. “And having pursued it as far as we could, we found we could only get accuracy of about 80%.”
Asked how they could trust the AI system sifting through ministerial papers could be trusted to give them good advice, Mr Burghart said: “It’s ultimately the minister’s responsibility to check the working.
“Where we are at the moment is that nothing is going unread because of red box. You get the summaries, you get the long reports, but my private office is still reading the long reports and so am I.”
He added: “It will be a question for ministers how they prioritise their time with the summaries they get and how reliable they think the summaries are.”
He indicated that the same was true of human officials, saying ministers would often have some staff on their team “whose work you might want to check more thoroughly than others.”
“We proceed with caution,” he added.
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