- Tory MP Alex Burghart has admitted that he uses an experimental ‘AI Red Box’
- System was developed by the Cabinet Office to help prioritise work
- Officials tried to install a chatbot on Gov.UK website but it started speaking French
Ministers have already begun using AI systems to read documents and determine which are more important, it has been revealed.
Conservative minister Alex Burghart has admitted that he uses an experimental ‘AI Red Box’, which has been developed by the Cabinet Office, to wade through mountains of papers he’s given to read every day.
The Minister for Implementation also claimed that another minister is also using the experimental system, as well as top civil servant Alex Chisolm.
He also revealed officials had tried to install a chatbot to feature on the Gov.UK website to assist with enquiries from the public, which would have access to the entire database of government information.
However, this experiment was ultimately scrapped when it did ‘some strange things’ which included randomly speaking French as well as being incorrect about a fifth of the time.
When 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.’
He continued: ‘It means that things that happened three, four or five years ago, those people are not around anymore.
‘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, Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar said his team hoped to go to the Treasury in the Spring with the aim of securing funding to roll the system out across Whitehall.
The Government Digital Service had 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.
However, this idea was eventually put on ice.
‘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%.’
When quizzed about how much they could trust the AI system to sift through ministerial papers as well as crucially provide 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 the 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.
‘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.’
Regardless, the 46-year-old minister also acknowledged 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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