5 ms·

Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice

43 points by adrianhon 2y ago

tyzoid 2y ago
I'm curious, did he not clean out old chats that were no longer needed? If UK FOI applies to this now, does that introduce recordkeeping/retention requirements?
- lores 2y ago
  It does, and from what I've seen the UK public service are pretty diligent in making sure the rules are enforced... but I don't expect ministers only use recorded accounts and machines.
yapyap 2y ago
Wow, the UK is in some deep shit governing wise. Sure I already suspected such a thing given what has been happening for the past decades but they still manage to surprise me.
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  If you've a decision to make, then asking chatgpt for 20 possibilities is a great way to get ideas. Using them blindly would, but there's no suggestion that is the case.
  - aaronbaugher 2y ago
    It's a great way to get 20 ideas that all come from a particular curated mindset.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      As would also be the case if I were to ask any "expert" for their ideas.
thinkingemote 2y ago
Very interesting point about whether AI Chats are personal data or not, like email or a whatsapp message, or if they should be treated more like a web search. Certainly the AI isn't a person....
android521 2y ago
Their policies might even improve. Who knows
worewood 2y ago
It sounds bad, but the alternative is policy makers making decisions out of their arses, so maybe this really is a tool that can improve public management. Problem is that the owner of the AI service has power over the model and thus can influence government decisions. Maybe we should require that government use of AI should be required to use open models only.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > the alternative is policy makers making decisions out of their arses Or, you know, consulting experts.
  - graemep 2y ago
    When the politicians consult experts they usually consult experts who give them the answers they want. They get rid of experts (e.g. Professor Nutt) who give them advice they do not like. Sometimes they go to the other extreme and think experts are gods, and do not question the advice, check whether other experts would disagree with it etc.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Chatbots excel at giving you the answers you want.
    - toasteros 2y ago
      LLMs literally only tell you what you want to hear. They are Dunning-Krueger machines. Ask it about something you don't know: you'll learn something new. Ask it about something you do know: you'll raise your eyebrow, "huh that's not quite right..."
      - graemep 2y ago
        Sounds like the media: Gell-Mann Amnesia more than Dunning-Kreuger?
- rightbyte 2y ago
throw949494i 2y ago
[flagged]
lores 2y ago
Those seem like non-idiotic, reasonable uses of ChatGPT. Reassuringly disappointing. My bigger concern is that a company like OpenAI has the resources to identify requests by bigwigs of interest, and a unique window into their head. With US friendship on dubious terms, I'd have thought GCHQ would have had a few stern talks with the government.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't personally find ChatGPT as useful as some people here apparently do. But, assuming outputs are not being put into effect unthinkingly, this seems well in the domain of ChatGPT being used for brainstorming as many people on this board seem to endorse. Certainly, information leakage from search activities of any kind by high government officials is a cause for concern (as are travel patterns etc.).
- bognition 2y ago
  The resources required are petty trivial. Users hand over their name and email when they create an account. Likewise you get the IP address of a request. You could identify which world leaders are using ChatGPT pretty easily.
  - lores 2y ago
    I would bet a fair amount that the Cabinet Office / GCHQ provide anonymisers for high-ranking public servants and orders not to use pm@gov.uk as an ID. ChatGPT takes rich text, though, which is a lot easier to de-anonymise than random search keywords.
- graemep 2y ago
  I agree it is a concern. However. a lot of UK government IT decisions are of similar concern. Using Zoom for cabinet meetings (where extremely secret stuff gets discussed) during lockdown was even worse. The courts use MS Teams for remote hearings - not as bad, but I do not like it either. The FOI request would have been sent to the government not Open AI, so I do not think Open AI would have needed to identify the individual.
walthamstow 2y ago
Seems relatively reasonable, certainly better than hiring Deloitte for more money and worse results. I doubt it's his only source of information. I'm very surprised this is subject to FOIA. I'll bet he learns to disable memory and uses incognito chats now though.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Yeah I frequently discuss difficult system design or other engineering problems with AI. I don't copy-paste it as my own thoughts, but use it as a way to brainstorm solutions. It's no different from discussing it with a colleague that has a very different brain from me. The tech secretary's use of AI seems perfectly appropriate.
  - gpjt 2y ago
    I've found it very useful with organisational problems too. I had a complex issue to work through recently and tried working with ChatGPT, Claude and Grok 3 to optimise letters to some of the people involved to try to get things solved in the way I felt was fairest for all involved (anonymised, of course, with no memory on ChatGPT). One neat trick was to export the letter from one chat, then to start a fresh one, say that I am <role of recipient> and provide the letter and ask what it thinks -- basically red-teaming it. The process of doing that clarified my thoughts and arguments so much that I never wound up having to send them -- I'd already made the right points on Slack and in meetings, and a compromise was achieved.
  - dazzawazza 2y ago
    The only really reliable use I discovered for AI so far is rubber-ducking. As you dig down it's often so hilariously useless it sparks my decaying intelligence to offer up a gem. Less fruitful than talking to a Junior Engineer but more useful than a physical rubber duck.
  - gh0stcat 2y ago
    > I don’t copy-paste it as my own thoughts Like how engineers claim they are not losing skills because they are using programming tool assistants, I think there is an over-confidence thing at play here, where the user of an AI assistant doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they are also being shaped by it. You are still being subtly influenced by something, that’s the whole issue at play here. OpenAI has incredible power in influencing the subconscious of so many people, and I think thats the thing to question here. I am not entirely against it, but we need to be honest with ourselves with how malleable our minds are and influenced we are by what we consume.
zelos 2y ago
Did it advise him to call app Britain and claim the digital dividend?
- walthamstow 2y ago
  As useless as a marzipan dildo
data_marsupial 2y ago
There's something very wrong with FOI legislation that allows this.
- bananaflag 2y ago
  Yeah this is highly shady
xrd 2y ago
Here is the list of IP blocks for the UK defense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre... Here is the nginx proxy rule so that requests from the UK government go to the right place: if ($remote_addr = 25.0.0.0/8) { set $backend_pool grok_with_special_information_for_really_smart_uk_tech_ministers; } else { set $backend_pool grok_for_poor_and_stupid_uk_people; } I don't have actual information that Grok names the backend servers this way, btw. Nor, do I know if Peter Kyle is using tor. This was generated with help from Claude, so please verify your own sources.
bognition 2y ago
I think all of the comments you are missing the point. We beginning to see the outsourcing of critical thinking to a few technology companies. We’ve stopped valuing leaders that understand issues and can make sane decisions. Instead we pick leaders that present good sound bites or appear strong. They in turn do not understand the issues and can get quick and easy answers from AI that for the most part are pretty damn good. The most insidious part of this, is it gives us the feeling that we are still in control. When in reality, a few extremely powerful and extremely wealthy individuals are in a position to dramatically shape and shift policy. 15 years ago Google was still pretty damn good. Today most people agree that it’s departed from its original goals and in its efforts to make money actively censors and shapes the results it serves. The AI systems people use to make decisions will make this shift once they have a lock on the market. It’s wild to see the creation of a technological equivalent to the medieval Catholic Church. an entity that represents itself as benevolent to the masses, but in reality, exploits them and maintains a stranglehold over the political ruling class.
- hu3 2y ago
  Maybe Google search isn't good for some websites. But I don't recall last time I had to click page 2 of their search.
  - lores 2y ago
    Uh. Google results are so irrelevant to me now that I've turned to using Perplexity instead, and just clicking on the provided links without paying much attention to its output.
- MrJohz 2y ago
  It doesn't necessarily sound like that's the case, though. It's difficult to get a good sense of the scale and extent of Kyle's usage of ChatGPT, but the examples cited in the article sound to me like he's using it for definitions (i.e. to replace Google), and messing around to try it out (with the podcast suggestions). It would be worrying if the report was that Kyle based some significant part of his decision-making on AI chatbots, but no-one here seems to be claiming that's the case. As it is, given the article only writes about two significant examples and a bunch of definitions, it sounds like he's not been using it much at all.
josefritzishere 2y ago
This is an embarassingly terrible idea.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tim333 2y ago
I think there's something to be said for a LLM for government policy. It should be trained for the country in question and open sourced. Then as well as the politicians asking what we should do about the NHS or what have you, the public could do so as well and see where the ideas were coming from. Given the current state of LLMs it would only be giving advice but even so would probably give better advice than some of the idiots that get elected. Also maybe more importantly it would be a known quantity whereas humans can be deceptive.

43 points by adrianhon 2y ago

I'm curious, did he not clean out old chats that were no longer needed? If UK FOI applies to this now, does that introduce recordkeeping/retention requirements?

lores 2y ago
It does, and from what I've seen the UK public service are pretty diligent in making sure the rules are enforced... but I don't expect ministers only use recorded accounts and machines.

yapyap 2y ago

Wow, the UK is in some deep shit governing wise. Sure I already suspected such a thing given what has been happening for the past decades but they still manage to surprise me.

helsinkiandrew 2y ago
If you've a decision to make, then asking chatgpt for 20 possibilities is a great way to get ideas. Using them blindly would, but there's no suggestion that is the case.
- aaronbaugher 2y ago
  It's a great way to get 20 ideas that all come from a particular curated mindset.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    As would also be the case if I were to ask any "expert" for their ideas.

thinkingemote 2y ago

Very interesting point about whether AI Chats are personal data or not, like email or a whatsapp message, or if they should be treated more like a web search. Certainly the AI isn't a person....

android521 2y ago

Their policies might even improve. Who knows

worewood 2y ago

It sounds bad, but the alternative is policy makers making decisions out of their arses, so maybe this really is a tool that can improve public management. Problem is that the owner of the AI service has power over the model and thus can influence government decisions. Maybe we should require that government use of AI should be required to use open models only.

ceejayoz 2y ago
> the alternative is policy makers making decisions out of their arses Or, you know, consulting experts.
- graemep 2y ago
  When the politicians consult experts they usually consult experts who give them the answers they want. They get rid of experts (e.g. Professor Nutt) who give them advice they do not like. Sometimes they go to the other extreme and think experts are gods, and do not question the advice, check whether other experts would disagree with it etc.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Chatbots excel at giving you the answers you want.
  - toasteros 2y ago
    LLMs literally only tell you what you want to hear. They are Dunning-Krueger machines. Ask it about something you don't know: you'll learn something new. Ask it about something you do know: you'll raise your eyebrow, "huh that's not quite right..."
    - graemep 2y ago
      Sounds like the media: Gell-Mann Amnesia more than Dunning-Kreuger?
rightbyte 2y ago

throw949494i 2y ago

[flagged]

lores 2y ago

Those seem like non-idiotic, reasonable uses of ChatGPT. Reassuringly disappointing. My bigger concern is that a company like OpenAI has the resources to identify requests by bigwigs of interest, and a unique window into their head. With US friendship on dubious terms, I'd have thought GCHQ would have had a few stern talks with the government.

ghaff 2y ago
I don't personally find ChatGPT as useful as some people here apparently do. But, assuming outputs are not being put into effect unthinkingly, this seems well in the domain of ChatGPT being used for brainstorming as many people on this board seem to endorse. Certainly, information leakage from search activities of any kind by high government officials is a cause for concern (as are travel patterns etc.).
bognition 2y ago
The resources required are petty trivial. Users hand over their name and email when they create an account. Likewise you get the IP address of a request. You could identify which world leaders are using ChatGPT pretty easily.
- lores 2y ago
  I would bet a fair amount that the Cabinet Office / GCHQ provide anonymisers for high-ranking public servants and orders not to use pm@gov.uk as an ID. ChatGPT takes rich text, though, which is a lot easier to de-anonymise than random search keywords.
graemep 2y ago
I agree it is a concern. However. a lot of UK government IT decisions are of similar concern. Using Zoom for cabinet meetings (where extremely secret stuff gets discussed) during lockdown was even worse. The courts use MS Teams for remote hearings - not as bad, but I do not like it either. The FOI request would have been sent to the government not Open AI, so I do not think Open AI would have needed to identify the individual.

walthamstow 2y ago

Seems relatively reasonable, certainly better than hiring Deloitte for more money and worse results. I doubt it's his only source of information. I'm very surprised this is subject to FOIA. I'll bet he learns to disable memory and uses incognito chats now though.

zeroCalories 2y ago
Yeah I frequently discuss difficult system design or other engineering problems with AI. I don't copy-paste it as my own thoughts, but use it as a way to brainstorm solutions. It's no different from discussing it with a colleague that has a very different brain from me. The tech secretary's use of AI seems perfectly appropriate.
- gpjt 2y ago
  I've found it very useful with organisational problems too. I had a complex issue to work through recently and tried working with ChatGPT, Claude and Grok 3 to optimise letters to some of the people involved to try to get things solved in the way I felt was fairest for all involved (anonymised, of course, with no memory on ChatGPT). One neat trick was to export the letter from one chat, then to start a fresh one, say that I am <role of recipient> and provide the letter and ask what it thinks -- basically red-teaming it. The process of doing that clarified my thoughts and arguments so much that I never wound up having to send them -- I'd already made the right points on Slack and in meetings, and a compromise was achieved.
- dazzawazza 2y ago
  The only really reliable use I discovered for AI so far is rubber-ducking. As you dig down it's often so hilariously useless it sparks my decaying intelligence to offer up a gem. Less fruitful than talking to a Junior Engineer but more useful than a physical rubber duck.
- gh0stcat 2y ago
  > I don’t copy-paste it as my own thoughts Like how engineers claim they are not losing skills because they are using programming tool assistants, I think there is an over-confidence thing at play here, where the user of an AI assistant doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they are also being shaped by it. You are still being subtly influenced by something, that’s the whole issue at play here. OpenAI has incredible power in influencing the subconscious of so many people, and I think thats the thing to question here. I am not entirely against it, but we need to be honest with ourselves with how malleable our minds are and influenced we are by what we consume.

zelos 2y ago

Did it advise him to call app Britain and claim the digital dividend?

walthamstow 2y ago
As useless as a marzipan dildo

data_marsupial 2y ago

There's something very wrong with FOI legislation that allows this.

bananaflag 2y ago
Yeah this is highly shady

xrd 2y ago

Here is the list of IP blocks for the UK defense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre... Here is the nginx proxy rule so that requests from the UK government go to the right place: if ($remote_addr = 25.0.0.0/8) { set $backend_pool grok_with_special_information_for_really_smart_uk_tech_ministers; } else { set $backend_pool grok_for_poor_and_stupid_uk_people; } I don't have actual information that Grok names the backend servers this way, btw. Nor, do I know if Peter Kyle is using tor. This was generated with help from Claude, so please verify your own sources.

bognition 2y ago

I think all of the comments you are missing the point. We beginning to see the outsourcing of critical thinking to a few technology companies. We’ve stopped valuing leaders that understand issues and can make sane decisions. Instead we pick leaders that present good sound bites or appear strong. They in turn do not understand the issues and can get quick and easy answers from AI that for the most part are pretty damn good. The most insidious part of this, is it gives us the feeling that we are still in control. When in reality, a few extremely powerful and extremely wealthy individuals are in a position to dramatically shape and shift policy. 15 years ago Google was still pretty damn good. Today most people agree that it’s departed from its original goals and in its efforts to make money actively censors and shapes the results it serves. The AI systems people use to make decisions will make this shift once they have a lock on the market. It’s wild to see the creation of a technological equivalent to the medieval Catholic Church. an entity that represents itself as benevolent to the masses, but in reality, exploits them and maintains a stranglehold over the political ruling class.

hu3 2y ago
Maybe Google search isn't good for some websites. But I don't recall last time I had to click page 2 of their search.
- lores 2y ago
  Uh. Google results are so irrelevant to me now that I've turned to using Perplexity instead, and just clicking on the provided links without paying much attention to its output.
MrJohz 2y ago
It doesn't necessarily sound like that's the case, though. It's difficult to get a good sense of the scale and extent of Kyle's usage of ChatGPT, but the examples cited in the article sound to me like he's using it for definitions (i.e. to replace Google), and messing around to try it out (with the podcast suggestions). It would be worrying if the report was that Kyle based some significant part of his decision-making on AI chatbots, but no-one here seems to be claiming that's the case. As it is, given the article only writes about two significant examples and a bunch of definitions, it sounds like he's not been using it much at all.

josefritzishere 2y ago

This is an embarassingly terrible idea.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tim333 2y ago

I think there's something to be said for a LLM for government policy. It should be trained for the country in question and open sourced. Then as well as the politicians asking what we should do about the NHS or what have you, the public could do so as well and see where the ideas were coming from. Given the current state of LLMs it would only be giving advice but even so would probably give better advice than some of the idiots that get elected. Also maybe more importantly it would be a known quantity whereas humans can be deceptive.