Member of Congress Reads AI-Generated Speech On House Floor (apnews.com) 48
U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss read a speech on the floor of the U.S. House that was generated by AI chatbot ChatGPT. "Auchincloss said he prompted the system in part to 'write 100 words to deliver on the floor of the House of Representatives' about the legislation," reports the Associated Press. "Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress." From the report: The bill, which Auchincloss is refiling, would establish a joint U.S.-Israel AI Center in the United States to serve as a hub for AI research and development in the public, private and education sectors. Auchincloss said part of the decision to read a ChatGPT-generated text was to help spur debate on AI and the challenges and opportunities created by it. He said he doesn't want to see a repeat of the advent of social media, which started small and ballooned faster than Congress could react. "I'm the youngest parent in the Democratic caucus, AI is going to be part of my life and it could be a general purpose technology for my children," said Auchincloss, 34.
The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide." "There were probably about a dozen of my colleagues on the floor. I bet none of them knew it was written by a computer," he said. Lawmakers and others shouldn't be reflexively hostile to the new technology, but also shouldn't wait too long before drafting policies or new laws to help regulate it, Auchincloss said. In particular, he argued that the country needs a "public counterweight" to the big tech firms that would help guarantee that smaller developers and universities have access to the same cloud computing, cutting edge algorithms and raw data as larger companies.
The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide." "There were probably about a dozen of my colleagues on the floor. I bet none of them knew it was written by a computer," he said. Lawmakers and others shouldn't be reflexively hostile to the new technology, but also shouldn't wait too long before drafting policies or new laws to help regulate it, Auchincloss said. In particular, he argued that the country needs a "public counterweight" to the big tech firms that would help guarantee that smaller developers and universities have access to the same cloud computing, cutting edge algorithms and raw data as larger companies.
This guy discovered nobody listens in meetings (Score:5, Interesting)
"There were probably about a dozen of my colleagues on the floor. I bet none of them knew it was written by a computer," he said.
I'll even go further than that: I met half of that dozen colleagues didn't listen to a word he said.
I've been to countless work meetings where the presenter was so verbose and so dull everybody zoned out within the first 5 minutes, and everybody was just waiting for the guy to stop droning on. Speakers like that can say any old BS, outrageous lies or slip the most egregious comment in their speech nobody, would notice. And having watched C-SPAN quite a few times, I'd say the house definitely qualities as a prime example of a place full of the most abjectly dull speakers you'll ever hear a speech from.
Re: This guy discovered nobody listens in meetings (Score:1)
Making laws is all proceedural. Now that Marjorie Taylor Greene gets one attention does she not. Lol
Re: This guy discovered nobody listens in meetings (Score:2)
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Professional bullshitters ARE ChatGPTs. They have no use for competition.
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AI is the new frontier is spam. Not just email spam, things like self-published bespoke books that used to be written by lowly paid humans. News orgs have started using AI to generate copy too, for low quality stories where little journalistic input is required.
The content mill is being automated. You can imagine a future where even TV shows are produced by AI.
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I'm missing the problem here. Humans will continue to be creative. We should be embracing technology for the betterment of the world.
HEhe, just kidding. We know AI is here for all our jobs and once the system has no need of us things will just get worse.
Fear not! The rich people will be just fine and who cares about the rest of us.
what's the point? (Score:1)
let's just have AI parse through the internet and create random laws.
Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:2)
Israel is already the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Why is Israel being singled out here to receive the benefits of this bill?
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Shouldn't we consider Israelis African, since you know, Israel is part of the African continent? Race shouldn't really matter in this context. Why are we bring race up? You don't think race matters, do you?
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The AI probably parse through a bunch of articles that ties Israel as a close ally to the US.
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We'll get 4Chan [wikipedia.org] right on the job of producing some new training datasets for ChatGPT.
Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:3)
Israel is already the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.
Citation please?
We're throwing countless billions at Ukraine these past 12 months, that's gotta be some kind of record...
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Up to Nov 2022 USA provided almost $50 billion in aid to Ukraine see
https://www.cfr.org/article/ho... [cfr.org]
Since WW2 USA has provided Israel with $150 billion(not adjusted for inflation).
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideas... [fas.org]
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.
Successive Administrations, working with Congress, have provided Israel with significant
assistance in light of robust domestic U.S. su
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Interesting. This would mean that 150 billion was given to Israel over the course of 75 years, whereas, looking at the linked graph, 50 billion for Ukraine was over the course of a single year.
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Also, according to this [sipri.org], US gave 72 billion to Afghanistan over the course of 20 years.
Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:1)
Then just figure how much military aid goes to Israel every year that figure must be in the trillions by now.
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Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:1)
Has anyone noticed that figure has been stuck a 150B for the last 25 years?
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Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:1)
More than Afghanistan? More than Iraq? How much do you think the last 20-25 years cost the US? Its costing billions a day to keep ukraine running and the point of all this was nobody appeasing Russia thought they, Ukraine could resist this long. Among them many here in the US.
Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:2)
Ignoring the antisemitism on this thread, itâ(TM)s because Israel is the biggest producer of new high tech systems on earth. Theyâ(TM)re also the USâ(TM)s most reliable ally. Everything from smart homes to medical technology, Intel (and thus by extension AMD) CPU architectures, information security (the modern AI based antivirus) a LOT of new tech is created, invented and perfected there.
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Re: Why Israel and not other countries? (Score:1)
Very subjective all. My opinion mind you.
"I for one welcome our new robot ... (Score:1)
... overlords" is a bit too close to home for this.
Polarity (Score:2)
Generating for Congress (or politics writ large for that matter) should be easy. There's a lot of work being done right now to improve the accuracy, usefulness, and integrity of these responses. Just find the part of the code that appends these values, and change the plus to minus.
AI-human-hybrid speech (Score:4, Interesting)
"Auchincloss said he had to refine the prompt several times to produce the text he ultimately read. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress."
They do understand that refining the prompt and choosing the best one makes it more of a human-hybrid-generated than AI-written text, right?
I wonder if they made any small edits to that best output? I assume not, but not certain.
How much tax money was wasted in this joke? (Score:1)
He at least could have instructed ChatGPT to put a Rickroll in the speech.
Can't expect much creativity from politicians these days.
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Probably less money was wasted, than if a human had been paid to write the speech. And it was probably more insightful too.
"Member of Congress Reads" (Score:2)
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Maybe he was lip-syncing and it was actually a robot reading the text.
Idiot (Score:2)
It's not "AI", its cut and pasted guff from the Internet passed through a few filters.
So, probably better than his usual work.
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Cut and pasted guff from the internet... still a step up from the usual cut and pasted guff from some corporation that bought them.
It's a start (Score:2)
Now if you add a text-to-speech feature, we could literally replace our politicians with a small script.
Should fix that damn budget instantly!
They sounded automated before this (Score:1)
In summary, politicians spouts random gibberish (Score:2)
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The news is that the bot-written speech was more insightful than the usual speech written by a human!
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Re: In summary, politicians spouts random gibberis (Score:1)
They can now shoot bull faster, with less effort. And even with less accountability if you can imagine the republican party for example not taking responsibility for their own mutterings?
The horror! (Score:1)
A Congressional speech written by an intelligence? (Score:2)
What next? Will they read out a speech written by a human-level intelligence? Do they even have access to such technology?
I've tried this myself. (Score:3)
I've been writing fiction with assistance mostly from SudoWrite, but also sometimes turning to ChatGPT for specific tasks. A couple of weeks ago I needed one of my characters to give a short speech, so I went to ChatGPT. I gave it the speaker, the venue, and a list of talking points to hit, and it simply nailed that. In seconds it cranked out a perfect speech that needed no editing on my part. And I remember thinking at the time: Wow, speech writers are out of business!
Proof (Score:2)
Proof that most of Congress can be replaced by AI. Only input required is a single letter, either "D" or "R".