National's automated lie machine

The government has a problem: lots of people want information from it all the time. Information about benefits, about superannuation, ACC coverage and healthcare, taxes, jury service, immigration - and that's just the routine stuff. Responding to all of those queries takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. But now National has a solution: it will simply get a computer to lie to them:

The Government is venturing into the world of artificial intelligence, launching a virtual assistant dubbed Gov-GPT, modelled on Chat-GPT.

Technology Minister Judith Collins announced the new tool at the Aotearoa AI Summit in Auckland on Wednesday morning.

Callaghan Innovation will run a pilot of the chatbot, designed to help Kiwis easily find information about the government and its agencies.

"GovGPT is an exciting first step towards a vision of a 'digital front-door', where individuals can find answers to their questions about government in a convenient and timely way," Collins said.

The problem, of course, is that "AI" doesn't help people easily find information, or answer people's questions. Instead, it produces plausible information or answer-shaped objects, based on its input data. And whether those answer-shaped objects are actually correct is entirely a matter of accident. Which can have catastrophic consequences. In this case, it is likely to lead to people not getting benefits or entitlements they are entitled to, not doing things they are supposed to do, and (in the latter case) potentially going to jail. It is likely to have catastrophic consequences for people's trust in government. But Judith Collins clearly doesn't see that as her problem, and may view it as an advantage, another way of saving money.

The problem for the government is that once it has built an automated lie machine, people may wonder why we are paying our political class enormous amounts of money to lie to us on a daily basis, when such lies can so easily be generated by a machine. But Judith Collins has an enormous parliamentary pension package, so she probably doesn't see that as her problem either.