Canadian legislator reads out apparent LLM response in floor speech - Ars Technica
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Anyone who has used the Internet in recent years is probably used to encountering telltale signs of LLM prompting that lazy users sometimes forget to remove from their AI-generated pabulum. But a Canadian legislator took that idea to an embarrassing new level this week, reading an apparent LLM prompt instruction into the record during a floor speech.
Bill Oliver, a Progressive Conservative Party member of the legislative assembly of New Brunswick, noted in a speech last month that “One of the dangers associated with creating advocacy offices is that citizens often develop expectations that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices.” He then went on to say out loud that “here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points,” a line with all the hallmarks of an LLM presenting an alternative style option in response to a prompt.
The odd reading went more or less unnoticed at the time, but video of the remarks started spreading around social media networks like Reddit and Threads earlier this week. In Canada, the snafu is now getting mainstream attention from the likes of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The Toronto Star, the latter of which called it a sign of “a growing divide in our society: between the elites, who are only too happy to delegate their duties to the Borg; and the masses, who find this objectionable.”
Oliver is far from the first politician to blindly read a speech obviously prepared by someone else. He surely isn’t the first politician to rely on an LLM to aid in speech writing, either. But reading an obviously AI-generated non-sequitur aloud in such a public setting—apparently without realizing what was happening in real time—represents a brave new frontier in the annals of embarrassing revelations of AI use.
With his speech, Oliver joins a growing trend of professionals whose AI use is revealed in mortifying ways. Lawyers, authors, journalists, and academics have all faced problems when their LLM use has come to light in the recent past, usually when someone noticed obviously hallucinated errors in ostensibly human-written work. No wonder a Duke University study last year found that workers tend to hide their AI use, as colleagues see their work as “lazy” or “replaceable” for using LLMs.
Kyle Orland
Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland
Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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