From Harold Thimbleby, Cardiff, UK
You raise concerns over whether UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is advised by artificial intelligence, as the government uses it to summarise documents and possibly to prepare draft briefings. Its excuse for denying your requests to tell us more – that reviewing and summarising over 13,000 prompts used to elicit AI outputs was impractical – is questionable(3 May, p 12).
The government could provide a random selection of prompts: 100 might be representative, and could be easily reviewed. This would fulfil the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act. Or another, perhaps better option would be for the government to use AI to summarise the 13,000 prompts. If it can’t do this, surely it is no good at the job it is being used for!
