The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has come under fire after admitting that he regularly consults AI tools for a second opinion in his role running the country.
Kristersson, whose Moderate party leads Sweden’s centre-right coalition government, said he used tools including ChatGPT and the French service LeChat. His colleagues also used AI in their daily work, he said.
Kristersson told the Swedish business newspaper Dagens industri: “I use it myself quite often. If for nothing else than for a second opinion. What have others done? And should we think the complete opposite? Those types of questions.”
Tech experts, however, have raised concerns about politicians using AI tools in such a way, and the Aftonbladet newspaper accused Kristersson in a editorial of having “fallen for the oligarchs’ AI psychosis”.
“You have to be very careful,” Simone Fischer-Hübner, a computer science researcher at Karlstad University, told Aftonbladet, warning against using ChatGPT to work with sensitive information.
Kristersson’s spokesperson, Tom Samuelsson, later said the prime minister did not take risks in his use of AI. “Naturally it is not security sensitive information that ends up there. It is used more as a ballpark,” he said.
But Virginia Dignum, a professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umeå University, said AI was not capable of giving a meaningful opinion on political ideas, and that it simply reflects the views of those who built it.
“The more he relies on AI for simple things, the bigger the risk of an overconfidence in the system. It is a slippery slope,” she told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. “We must demand that reliability can be guaranteed. We didn’t vote for ChatGPT.”
