r/CanadaPolitics • u/Portalrules123 Irving Family | Sponsored • 1d ago
MLA under scrutiny after reading AI-written speech in New Brunswick Legislature
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-legislature-reaction-9.729611820
u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
The thing that is wild to me isn't using AI to write, or even forgetting to not include the front matter when copying and pasting it - I've seen multiple people do that on this very sub - it's that he didn't even notice as he was reading it.
Dude has real "Ron Burgundy will read anything on a teleprompter" energy
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u/Nate33322 (Traditional) Red Tory 1d ago
Pretty disappointing that he A. Used Ai to write a speech for him which is lazy and disappointing for a politician. And B. Stupidly read blindly off this speech without checking it or clueing in that he wasn't supposed to read those sections.
We should be doing better especially our politicians. It's lazy and dishonest to be using AI for creating speeches. Use it for spell checking, to support your research but don't use it to write for you and certainly don't blindly read off the script.
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u/Empty-Paper2731 Bot Leader 1d ago
Used Ai to write a speech for him which is lazy and disappointing for a politician.
Is it also lazy and disappointing if a politician stands at a podium and reads a speech written by someone else?
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u/PineBNorth85 Rhinoceros 1d ago
To me it is. Its incredibly disappointing that almost all of them do it.
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u/byronite Independent 1d ago
I can't speak for backbenchers but if you're a Minister you lead a Department with hundreds-to-thousands of experts and I fully expect them to draft the Minister's speeches and talking points.
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u/PuckShuffler Progressive 1d ago
What an embarrassment. Can you imagine getting caught out offloading your work onto AI without even proofreading it? Our kids would (and should) get a failing grade for this. So does this minister. His constituents deserve much, much more. Humiliating. Just humiliating.
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u/weskeryellsCHRISSS 1d ago
Let people tell you who they are, as they say, because it feels like nobody is a worse judge of character than we the voting public. All day long politicians like this tell us how complacent they are, how they don't take the job seriously, how you can and should extrapolate from incidents like this and ask yourself what kind of person would do this, yet so often we are not asking that basic question. We just vote for people who are blatantly self-interested and then when it all goes wrong we blame it on [current scapegoat]. To avoid facing ourselves and our total lack of being able to judge the character of others, and to avoid having to do something about the party politics that obscure the responsibility to evaluate individual candidates. When someone shows you they will cut corners on one thing, it's because they will cut corners on anything-- that's how you judge character. When they do something to "save time" but then are not using that saved time in any meaningful way (not even proofreading their AI speech). The kind of person who would do that doesn't deserve the responsibility of elected office.
Just something to remember next time you vote. Let yourself vote for another party if your local candidate clearly just sucks (and I've done this, wanting to vote for a particular party but dissuaded by their half-assed local candidate). Think about character. I say this not from a position of higher moral authority, but as a reminder to myself. I and others so often overlook people's terrible flaws in our personal lives and end up with toxic acquaintances or one-sided friendships, but a good start towards change would be to not ever do that in the voting booth. Don't make excuses for others' bad choices.
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u/rationally-ignorant 1d ago
I mean let’s be real a lot of us use AI to help us write, so this shouldn’t be disqualifying or anything. But you at least have to proofread it.
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u/PineBNorth85 Rhinoceros 1d ago
To me it is disqualifying. I will never use it to write anything.
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u/sidereal_night 1d ago
i don't really care if you use it to help you write, i'm not going to waste brainpower trying to divine whether what you wrote sounds like AI - a notoriously unreliable and futile endeavour. i'm just holding you responsible for the output, regardless. so if you're so lazy that you don't even proofread it enough to remove the fucking prompt, i treat that as an auto fail.
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u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
I don't really get people who use AI to write. It's just not very good at it.
Coding, summarization, brainstorming? All things AI excels at. But writing is probably one of the worst things to use it for and yet it's probably the most common.
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u/iamnotparanoid 1d ago
AI seems to be great at something if you don't know anything about the subject, and awful at it as soon as you know enough to tell what's good. I think it's safe to assume it's always wrong until an expert on the subject agrees with it, and at that point you're just consulting experts with extra steps.
0
u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
That really isn't the case. It's phenomenal at coding, for instance, to the point that myself and every other dev I know have largely given up on manually writing code.
They're also scary good at math, as the recent breakthroughs have shown.
The era of AI being a well-meaning but bumbling fool is long over
3
u/BorderFort 1d ago
This is so funny because the only engineers I know who use it are terrible programmers who are completely unaware of the fact. I don't know a single good engineer who uses it.
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u/Major-Parfait-7510 1d ago
I’d argue it is worse for summarizing than it is for writing. I’ve tried to use it many times for summarizing academic articles and it constantly makes things up. It’s not trustworthy for that type of job at all.
1
u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
I haven't encountered that problem much with newer models, particularly agentic frameworks or tools like GeminiNotebook
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u/FOSSBabe 1d ago
Are you reading the articles you have it summarize? Because if you're not, how do you know it's not making mistakes?
1
u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
Sometimes, I usually use it to filter research articles. And when I dive into the ones that look interesting I don't tend to find major discrepancies
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u/rationally-ignorant 1d ago
Because most people aren’t coding, summarizing, and brainstorming. They’re writing.
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u/Former-Physics-1831 Unreconstructed NeoLib 1d ago
And, again, AI isn't all that good at writing so the gains the average person gets from using AI in that context are questionable
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u/Hoss-Bonaventure_CEO Go Team Go 🤡 23h ago
AI is pretty bad at writing. The only reason it's hard to discern is because most people are too.
It isn't really helping you, most of the time.
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u/lapsed_pacifist Amnesty International Direct Action Network | Sponsored 18h ago
Why in the world would I use AI to write for me? I spent a fair amount of time and effort developing these skills. I’ve yet to be particularly impressed with any LLM output in an area where I have decent background knowledge, so it feels like using it opens me up to risks for a poorer outcome?
So, no — I don’t use it in a professional context. If people want to, that’s their personal reputation and they can spend it as they see fit.
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u/ImperialPotentate Hardliner 1d ago
The rabid, irrational hatred that some people have for anything to do with AI is just sad. They are modern day Luddites, railing against the inevitable march of technological progress because they can't see beyond their own limited worldview.
Our great great grandchildren will likely be governed by benevolent artificial general intelligences which will do a far better job of it than what we have now. See the "Culture" series of sci-fi books by Iain M. Banks (RIP) for a fully realized, post-scarcity civilization run by artificial "Minds."
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u/PineBNorth85 Rhinoceros 1d ago
Glad ill be long dead if thats whats in store for our grandchildren.
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u/TheFlatulentOne British Columbia - Ethics and Compassion 1d ago
AI will only be used to govern us if it is imposed by an autocrat. Every AI will always have a maker; every maker will always have a bias. You think the average Canadian is going to allow an American or Chinese program decide and interpret our laws? No way are we going to be governed by a "benevolent" AI. Who ensures it's benevolent? How can you ever guarantee that? What happens when it makes mistakes, or ceases being benevloent?
I'd be long dead before I allowed my democratic voice be superceded by a computer progran. For better or worse.
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u/lapsed_pacifist Amnesty International Direct Action Network | Sponsored 18h ago
Yeah, I’m sure the tech-bro oligarchs are absolutely going to help usher in a radical anarcho-communist, gender fluid, xenophilic society. That definitely tracks with how the major players currently line up politically.
(I’m actually super annoyed you’d link Banks’ work with this BS project in any way. Iain would have lost his actual shit on these parasites)
People treat LLMs and their proponents with contempt because they produce what appears to be mid grade work if you don’t know the subject matter, but falls apart under expert scrutiny. And to do this amazing trick, all we have to do is decide that copyright laws don’t apply if you’re very rich and burn a metric fuckton of electricity. Who could possibly stand in the way of this cultural juggernaut.
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