An AI tool has been used to review public responses to a government consultation for the first time and is now set to be rolled out more widely in an effort to save money and staff time.
The tool, named “Consult”, was first used by the Scottish government when it was seeking perspectives on the regulation of non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as lip filler.
The UK government said the tool analysed responses and was able to produce results identical to human officials, and will now be used to review responses from other consultations, while also being developed further.
While reviewing more than 2,000 responses, Consult identified key themes, which were then checked and refined by experts in the Scottish government.
The government built Consult to be among its new package of AI tools, nicknamed “Humphrey”, which they claim will “speed up work in Whitehall and cut back on consulting spending”.
They claim that, across the 500 consultations they run annually, the new tool will save the British taxpayer £20m a year and save up about 75,000 hours for government officials to focus on other work.
Michael Rovatsos, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, said he believed that while the rewards of Consult could be great, the risks of biases influencing the AI shouldn’t be overlooked.
“While in principle the idea is that a human will always be in the loop, in practice the reality is that a person will not always have that much time to check every time, and that is when the biases will creep in.”
Rovatsos also said that “bad actors”, domestic and foreign, could influence the AI’s integrity through feeding it prompts.
“You will have to invest in making sure that the systems are safe and robust and that will take money and time,” he said.
“I think that unlocking the benefits and avoiding the harm requires a lot more additional upfront investment and learning than what it might look like in the first instance. There’s a danger that ministers and civil servants might see this as a quick fix to save money, but doing this well is essential and hard.”
The government claims that Consult will work 1,000 times faster than a human and will be 400 times cheaper, with its conclusions being “incredibly similar” to those reached by experts but in a fraction of the time.
Speaking on the launch of Consult, the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said Consult would save “millions” for taxpayers.
“No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors.
“After demonstrating such promising results, Humphrey will help us cut the costs of governing and make it easier to collect and comprehensively review what experts and the public are telling us on a range of crucial issues.
“The Scottish government has taken a bold first step. Very soon, I’ll be using Consult, within Humphrey, in my own department and others in Whitehall will be using it too – speeding up our work to deliver the plan for change.”
There is no fixed date yet for Consult, which is still in its trial phase, being implemented in government work, but the belief is that it could be deployed in government offices by the end of 2025.
