Look, it takes a while to get used to new technology. Even the mighty Ron Burgundy experienced that problem, when some joker or jokers repeatedly added things to the teleprompter script, knowing he would read whatever appeared there. Great Odin’s Raven, that was embarrassing—once he realized what he’d done, which took a while.
Something similar happened in the New Brunswick Legislature in June, when legislator Bill Oliver got up to deliver a speech. The speech lasted a total of 40 minutes, the last 10 or so of which was only because it took Oliver that long to realize that he had left in the chat responses of whatever AI tool he had used to write it for him.
After talking about energy or something for something like 30 minutes, Oliver told his colleagues, “Here’s a more natural-flowing version of that section that reads like legislative speech rather than a series of short points.” An odd thing to say during a speech, but exactly the kind of thing a generative-AI “helper” would tell you if you, let’s say, gave it a document that contained a series of short points and asked it to turn that into a legislative speech. But that should not become part of the speech itself—something Oliver still did not realize he’d done even after reading it aloud.
A few minutes later, Oliver read out these words: “Here’s a more developed and flowing version of the same section.” And a few minutes after that he said, “This section adds roughly … excuse me.”
The CBC’s report has a clip of this, but it compresses what was apparently a train wreck lasting several minutes. Only after he had started to quote his AI friend for the third time did it dawn on Oliver, still relatively slowly, that something was wrong.
In a statement, Oliver conceded that he had “employed AI to help prepare speaking notes,” although he clearly was not speaking from notes, but rather reading a document verbatim without really paying attention to it. He then admitted mistakes had been made, in a sentence I’m pretty sure he wrote himself because of its tortured construction and use of the passive voice.
“When printing the final version of my speech,” he said, “AI prompts were not removed, which were spoken by me and has caused much concern of many individuals.” He’s definitely the one who spoke them, but he did not identify who failed to remove them or who the individuals were of whom much concern had reportedly been caused.
“Look, we’re all human,” said interim party leader Glen Savoie, forgetting that there was at least one non-human involved. “He [Oliver] made a mistake. He recognizes the importance of making sure that it’s our voices that are heard on the floor of the legislature [and not those of soulless machines], and we’ll work towards ensuring that happens as we go forward.”
Green Party members were predictably more critical. (Oliver and Savoie are apparently in something called the “Progressive Conservative” party, so those words presumably mean something different in New Brunswick than they do down here.) For one thing, the speech was “boring and hard to listen to,” said Megan Mitton, though it got more interesting there at the end, and its length meant more important work did not get done.
“We were not elected to come here and have generative AI write 40-minute speeches for us,” Mitton said. “We’re here to represent people, use our own brains and thoughts.” Again, up there that probably makes sense, since they still have representative government and all. Mitten said she did not think Oliver was the only legislator using AI to write speeches by any means, saying she had noticed “lots of examples” that at least sounded like an AI was responsible.
The CBC’s article goes on to quote a number of experts who remind readers that generative AI tools cannot be relied upon without questioning and verifying their output, but you already know that.