Will this stop politicians from using AI?

Freedom of information laws have their limits, as any journalist who has used them to get information out of the government knows.

One thing that is usually sacrosanct, though, is whatever transpires between a minister (or civil servant) and their search engine. People have tried to obtain search histories before, and come up blank – because it doesn’t result in the production of new information, it was ruled, a minister’s search history stays private.

But the New Scientist’s Chris Stokel-Walker found a clever chink in the armour: what about a minister’s ChatGPT history? As a result, technology secretary Peter Kyle has found himself in the unfortunate position of having his query history pored over by the world’s media.

It is at least a little embarrassing, though it surely could have been worse: Kyle asks ChatGPT for recommendations of podcasts he could appear on, for policy suggestions and ideas, and for definitions of fairly basic technological terms. He’s getting some ridicule for that, but he could – of course – simply be trying out the new tech for himself, which would not be an unreasonable thing for a technology minister to do.

The bigger headache for the government might be trying to persuade anyone in the public sector to use AI now that their search history could be public at any moment. Google creates a custom search page result every time you search – which is just as original (or not) as a ChatGPT query reply – so the precedent is confusing.

But if Keir Starmer wants an AI revolution, he might have to work out what to do about the deluge of search history queries headed his way…