The government wants to use AI to help ministers lower their workload, and to slim down the civil service, according to Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden.
Dowden outlined these plans in an interview with The Sunday Times.
“We are right now rolling out a trial of the application of AI to ministerial red boxes,” says Dowden. These red boxes refer to the official documents prepared by ministers’ offices.
“So much of the work that goes into producing the [red box] submissions I need to make decisions on as a minister involve taking a mass of different pieces of information, getting to the essence of the core point, then fitting that across with where parliament is, where the courts are, where public sentiment is.”
Dowden suggests the work of reading, summarising and compiling important documents could be done using AI instead of civil servants.
“If you could assimilate all that, that creates enormous both savings of time but also much more rigorous decision-making,” says Dowden. That rigour appears to stem from the ability to have summaries of information on demand rather than having to wait for a member of staff to do the work.
This would have a hand in plans to dramatically cut down the number of people working within the civil service.
In November 2022, Rishi Sunak canned Boris Johnson’s plan to cull 91,000 civil service jobs, representing around 20% of the workforce.
However, in October 2023, Jeremy Hunt announced fresh plans to cut 63,000 civil service roles as part of cost-saving measures.
Is AI safe to use?
The government’s own advice on the use of AI within the civil service warns against an over-reliance on the large language model (LLM) systems likely to be used for these tasks, though.
“False information can appear at any point and all facts and assertions must be cross-checked, no matter how authoritatively they appear to be presented,” it reads. “Output from generative AI is susceptible to bias and misinformation, they need to be checked and cited appropriately.
“Do not use [AI] for authoring messages and summarising facts to others,” is one of the government’s key pieces of advice, coming close to conflict with Dowden’s plans.
This advice also refers to the use of the same AI tools the public has access to including Google Bard and ChatGPT.
The government established an Office for AI in 2018, but its role is primarily to guide national AI strategy rather than to act as a steward of its use within government.
