The Debate Around ChatGPT and Its Roles in Politics

Sunday - April 30 2023, 02:19 UTC - 1 year ago

ChatGPT, an AI tool released by OpenAI, has quickly been embraced by politicians, with lawmakers using it to draft laws, give political speeches, and generate questions and answers. Experts are warning against rapid uptake of this controversial tool that has a notable liberal bias and is accused of fabricating 'facts'. AI use in politics is seen as a cliche generator and has limited value, with politicians using it for grandstanding and staff on the campaign trail potentially utilizing the bot for repetitive tasks, such as generating emails.

The AI bot ChatGPT has passed exams, written poetry, and deployed in newsrooms, and now politicians are seeking it out—but experts are warning against rapid uptake of a tool also famous for fabricating "facts".

The chatbot, released last November by US firm OpenAI, has quickly moved centre stage in politics—particularly as a way of scoring points.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently took a direct hit from the bot when he answered some innocuous questions about healthcare reform from an opposition MP.

Unbeknownst to the PM, his adversary had generated the questions with ChatGPT. He also generated answers that he claimed were "more sincere" than Kishida's.

The PM hit back that his own answers had been "more specific".

French trade union boss Sophie Binet was on-trend when she drily assessed a recent speech by President Emmanuel Macron as one that "could have been done by ChatGPT".But the bot has also been used to write speeches and even help draft laws.

"It's useful to think of ChatGPT and generative AI in general as a cliche generator," David Karpf of George Washington University in the US said during a recent online panel.

"Most of what we do in politics is also cliche generation." .

--- 'Limited added value' --- .

Nowhere has the enthusiasm for grandstanding with ChatGPT been keener than in the United States.

Last month, Congresswoman Nancy Mace gave a five-minute speech at a Senate committee enumerating potential uses and harms of AI—before delivering the punchline that "every single word" had been generated by ChatGPT.

Local US politician Barry Finegold had already gone further though, pronouncing in January that his team had used ChatGPT to draft a bill for the Massachusetts Senate.

The bot reportedly introduced original ideas to the bill, which is intended to rein in the power of chatbots and AI.

Anne Meuwese from Leiden University in the Netherlands wrote in a column for Dutch law journal RegelMaat last week that she had carried out a similar experiment with ChatGPT and also found that the bot introduced original ideas.

But while ChatGPT was to some extent capable of generating legal texts, she wrote that lawmakers should not fall over each other to use the tool.

"Not only is much still unclear about important issues such as environmental impact, bias and the ethics at OpenAI... the added value also seems limited for now," she wrote.

--- Agitprop bots --- .

The added value might be more obvious lower down the political food chain, though, where staffers on the campaign trail face a treadmill of repetitive tasks.

Karpf suggested AI could be useful for generating emails asking for donations—necessary messages that were not intended to be masterpieces.

This raises an issue of whether the bots can be trained to represent a political point of view.

ChatGPT has already provoked a storm of controversy over its apparent liberal bias—the bot initially refused to write a poem praising Donald Trump but happily churned out couplets for his successor as US President Joe Biden.

Billionaire magnate Elon Musk has spied an opportunity. Despite warning that AI systems could destroy civilization, he recently promised to develop TruthGPT, an AI text tool stripped of the perceived liberal bias.

Perhaps he needn't have bothered. New Zealand researcher David Rozado alreay claims to have developed an algorithm that can detect political bias in AI texts.