First we learn that doctors are using ChatGPT to treat patients. Now, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is taking a heaping ration of Lutfisk for admitting he’s been using ChatGPT to help run the government.
Speaking with a Nordic news site, Kristersson said that he sometimes asks ChatGPT for a “second opinion” when it comes to governance strategies.
“I use it myself quite often,” he said, “If for nothing else than for a second opinion. What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite? Those types of questions.”
Kristersson’s comments predictably came under fire.
“The more he relies on AI for simple things, the bigger the risk of overconfidence in the system,” Virginia Dignum, a professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umeå University, told DiGITAL. “It is a slippery slope. We must demand that reliability can be guaranteed. We didn’t vote for ChatGPT.”
“Too bad for Sweden that AI mostly guesses,” wrote Aftonbladet’s Signe Krantz. “Chatbots would rather write what they think you want than what you need to hear.”
“You have to be very careful,” Simone Fischer-Hübner, a computer science researcher at Karlstad University, told Aftonbladet, noting that people shouldn’t submit sensitive information to GPT.
As Gizmodo opines;
Krantz makes a good point, which is that chatbots can be incredibly sycophantic and delusional. If you have a leader asking a chatbot leading questions, you can imagine a scenario in which the software program’s algorithms only serve to reinforce that leader’s existing prerogatives (or to push them further over the edge into uncharted territory). Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of politicians feel the need to use ChatGPT as a consigliere yet.
Kristersson spokesman Tom Samuelsson ‘clarified’ that the PM doesn’t take risks in his use of AI.
“Naturally it is not security sensitive information that ends up there. It is used more as a ballpark,” he said.
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