A New Brunswick politician has chalked up a dubious world’s first for Canada by reading out AI prompts in an official speech.
In a June 9 speech to the legislative assembly, Progressive Conservative Bill Oliver read out the following line from a prepared text: “Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”
While it’s certainly not the first time a politician has been caught using an AI engine to write their speeches, this does appear to be the first time that the politician in question didn’t bother to remove the telltale signs of the act before reading the speech into the public record.
That video description is actually a wee bit misleading. He didn’t just do it once, he did it three times before it veeery sloooooowly dawned on him that something had gone extremely awry.
In the text Oliver read, there were three instances where his AI use was obvious, including where he said: “Here’s a more natural-flowing version of that section that reads like legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”
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 craziest part of this, obviously, is that it happened at all. But a big honourable mention has to go to the fact that his speech was so gripping and exciting that not a single person in range of it noticed what he’d done until somebody posted about it on Reddit weeks after the fact.
And since I’m sure you’re waiting for it, yeah, that’s what I thought of too.