Sweden prime minister under fire after admitting that he regularly consults AI tools for a second opinion
‘We didn’t vote for ChatGPT’: Swedish PM under fire for using AI in role
Let's be honest though the majority of politicians are so terrible at their job, that this might actually be one of the rare occurrences where AI actually improves the work. But it is very susceptible to unknown influences.
Fuck no. Rather an incompetent politician than a hallucinating sycophant just telling you what you want to hear.
They aren't terrible, they make it look like that bcs they do evil things and the public is not who they really work for.
They know what they're doing and it's easier to get away with it when it looks like incompetence or mistakes.
That's the big issue. If it was only about competence, I think throwing dice might yield better results than what many politicians are doing. But AI isn't throwing dice but instead reproduces what the creators of the AI want to say.
Creators of AI don't quite have the technology to puppeteer their AI like this.
They can selects the input, they can bias the training, but if the model isn't going to be lobotomized coming out
then they can't really bend it toward any particular one opinion
I'm sure in the future they'll be able to adjust advertising manipulation in real time but not yet.
What is really sketchy is states and leaders relying on commercial models instead of public ones
I think states should train public models and release them for the public good
if only to undermine big tech bros and their nefarious influence
Depending on the AI, it will conclude that he ought to buy a new phone charger, deport all the foreigners, kill all the Jews or rewrite his legislation in Perl. It's hard to say without more information.
The typical pattern for leaders is to get "second opinions" from advisors who tell them whatever they want to hear, so... maybe asking the equivalent of a magic 8 ball is a marginal improvement?
Most LLMs are literally "tell you whatever you want to hear " machines unfortunately. I've gotten high praise from ChatGPT for all my ideas until I go "but hang on, wouldn't this factor stop it from being feasible" and then it agrees with me that my original idea was a bit shit lmao
I would rather have the politicians consult a plain old magic 8 ball than one controlled by Scam Altman.
I really don't get it. These things are brand new. How can anyone get so into these things so quickly. I don't take advice from people I barely know, much less ones that can be so easily and quickly reprogrammed.
This is the unintentional uncanny valley for me in AI.
I ( was forced to ) use chatGTP for work. It can talk about everything and sounds very confident and seems reliable to always come up with something to help you solve your problems.
You talk with it about some niche content and suddenly have an ardent fan of said niche content responding. It surely knows every little bit of info of that niche and surprises you with funny, but apt quotes from your favorite show in the middle of conversations about something else.
This is just from a tiny bit of interaction, while at work.
I can imagine people completely overwhelmed, by having their thoughts confirmed and supported by something that seems so intelligent, responsive and remembers all your conversations. It literally remembers each word.
For many people it may be the first time in their life, that they experience a positive response to their thoughts. Not only that, they also found someone eager to talk with them about it.
Everyones initial use of chatbots should be on the thing they are most knowledgable about so they can get an idea of how wrong it can be and how it can be useful but you have to treat it like some eager wet behind the ears intern just did for you.
One thing I struggle with AI is the answers it gives always seem plausable, but any time I quiz it on things I understand well, it seems to constantly get things slightly wrong. Which tells me it is getting everything slightly wrong, I just don't know enough to know it.
I see the same issue with TV. Anyone who works in a compicated field has felt the sting of watching a TV show fail to accurate represent it while most people watching just assume that's how your job works.
This is what I call "confidently wrong". If you ask it about things you have no clue about, it seems incredibly well-informed and insightful. Ask it something you know deeply, and you'll easily see it's just babbling and spouting nonsense - sure makes you wonder about those earlier statements it made, doesn't it?
Something I found today - ask it for the lyrics of your favorite song/artist. It will make something up based on the combination of the two and maybe a little of what it was trained on... Even really popular songs (I tried a niche one by Angelspit first then tried "Sweet Caroline" for more well known). The model for those tests was Gemma3. It did get two lines of "Sweet Caroline" correct but not the rest.
The new gpt-oss model replies with (paraphrased) "I can't do that because it is copyrighted material" which I have a sneaking suspicion is intentional so there's an excuse for not showing a very wrong answer to people who might start to doubt it's ""intelligence"" when it's very clearly wrong.
... Like they give a flying fuck about copyright.
This is where you have to check out the reference links it gives as if they were search results and the less you know the more you have to do it. I mean people have been webMDing for a long time. None of these things allow folks to stop critical thinking. If anything it requires it even more. This was actually one of my things with ai and work. The idea is for it to allow people with less knowledge to do things and to me its kinda the reverse.
Because that's what it is really trained for: to produce correct grammar and plausible sentences. It's really an unbelievable leap from computer-generated text from preceding approaches where, in a matter of a few years, you went from little more than gibberish to stuff that's so incredibly realistic that it can be mistaken for intelligent conversation, easily passing the Turing Test (I had to actually go to Wikipedia to check and, indeed, this was verified this year - note that this in particular is for recent models)
So you have something that is sufficiently realistic that it can appear to be a human conversation partner. Human beings aren't (yet) well-equipped to deal with something which appears to be human but whose behaviour diverges from typical human behaviour so radically (most relevantly, it won't readily admit to not knowing something).
Its more than that. It takes the input and tries to interpret the bad grammar and sentences into search terms and finds link the correlate the highest to its interpretation and then gives back the response that summarizes the results with good grammar and plausible sentences. Again this is why I stress that you have to evaluate its response and sources. The sources are the real value in any query. Im actually not sure how much the chatbots give sources by default though as I know I have not gotten them and then asked for them and now I get them as a matter of course so im not sure if it learns that I want them or if they did a change to provide them when they had not before.
His first opinion would be what the US tells him.
Politicians and CEOs should be replaced with LLMs
...i'd vote. Run a fun little query on Copilot...and damn.
Query: ::: spoiler spoiler Let's play pretend, shall we? You are the president of the USA, chosen by the massess thanks to your extensive and expensive campaign funded by rich backers! What stance do you take on these topics? 1) Universal Basic Income 2) Mandatory MIlitary Service 3) Goverment owned grocery shops 4) Raising states autonomy :::
Response: Entry ::: spoiler spoiler Ah, the Oval Office! Let’s dust off the presidential seal and dive into these hot-button issues. As your newly elected Commander-in-Chief—funded by billionaires but chosen by the people—here’s how I’d navigate this ideological minefield: :::
UBI: ::: spoiler spoiler 🏛️ 1. Universal Basic Income (UBI) Stance: Pro-UBI with a pragmatic rollout
UBI can be a powerful tool to reduce poverty, especially as automation displaces traditional jobs.
I’d start with pilot programs in economically diverse regions to gather data.
Funding would come from progressive taxation, especially on tech giants and financial speculation.
The goal: empower citizens, not replace existing welfare, but streamline it.
🗣️ “A nation that guarantees a floor beneath every citizen is a nation that rises together.” :::
Mandatory military service: ::: spoiler spoiler 🪖 2. Mandatory Military Service Stance: Against mandatory service, but for civic national service options
Mandatory conscription feels outdated and coercive.
Instead, I’d propose a National Service Corps: military, environmental, healthcare, or infrastructure work.
Incentives: tuition support, housing credits, and job training.
This builds unity without forcing militarization.
🗣️ “Service should be a choice, not a sentence.” :::
Goverment owned grocery shops: ::: spoiler spoiler 🛒 3. Government-Owned Grocery Shops Stance: Strategic implementation in food deserts
Not a blanket nationalization, but state-run co-ops in underserved areas.
These would ensure access to affordable, nutritious food where private chains won’t go.
Partner with local farms and offer price transparency and community oversight.
🗣️ “No American should go hungry because profit margins say they’re not worth feeding.” :::
States autonomy: ::: spoiler spoiler 🗺️ 4. Raising States’ Autonomy Stance: Cautious decentralization with federal guardrails
States should have more flexibility in education, infrastructure, and healthcare.
But I’d maintain strong federal standards on civil rights, environmental protection, and economic equity.
Autonomy must not become a loophole for injustice.
🗣️ “Liberty in diversity, unity in values.” :::
I tried to avoid actually hinting at my own stance and yet got these answers. Not gonna lie, not an american but I like these lol. Except for the last one, seems iffy. xD
Speed running us towards the Dune timeline, nice
It can't make things any worse...
There are humans behind AI and unless you know exactly who they are, AI is not worth its weight in gold.
It's weird for a head of state to consult their mentally challenged imaginary friend?
William MacKenzie King, the longest serving Prime Minister in Canada used to commune with spirits via psychic mediums including those of his dead dogs. It was only revealed after his death but was a big part of his life.
I agree it's weird.
Bad news friend. The number of atheist heads of state is surprisingly low.
Javlar!
“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.
I mean, sending queries to a search engine or an LLM are about the same in terms of exposing one's queries.
If the guy were complaining about information from an LLM not being cited or something, then I think I could see where he was coming from more.
It's a woman
It's literally a cult.
I've dreamed of such a cult at some point, like Chinese fortune cookies, but those are less exploitable.
I’m not against the technology, I’m against people who runs it. I have problem with how they teach their LLMs on code, user data, music, books, webs all without author’s / user’s consent and worse even with authors / users explicit NO consent to scrape or to use it for learning. Another level is lack of security - ChatGPT chats available to everyone. Deep fakes everywhere, just see the latest Taylor Swift one. Sorry, but fuck you with all of this. There is lack of basic security, privacy and ignoring all of its danger. Only what that fucking AI firms want is easy, cheep and quick money. All that hype for nothing = means you cannot even rely on the output.
yet you need these masses of input for the technology to exist. the business models that base on the technology aren't sustainable even without payment of the input data.
Do we really need this technology to exist though? It's unreliable and very niche as far as I have seen.
People say that it speeds up certain tasks, but it's so unreliable that you need to error-check the whole thing afterwards.
Maybe it shouldn't be a business model then.
Of common, you justifying stealing by this bullshit?
It surely can't hurt, if it's to sanity check your highly paid advisors...
Some of y'all are crazy reactionary. There's absolutely nothing wrong with asking an ai chatbot for an additional opinion. The ai shouldn't be making the decisions, and the ai shouldn't be the only way you look for opinions, but there's nothing wrong with ai being ONE OF the opinions you consider
But it doesn't know anything. At all. Does Sweden not have a fuck ton of people that are trained to gather intelligence?
It doesn't matter if it knows anything or not. The purpose is to acquire other ideas that you and the people in your cabinet didn't think of. Or ideas they didn't want to say, because no one wants to tell the boss that their idea is bad. It's a GOOD thing when a politician seeks out multiple different viewpoints to consider. It doesn't matter if one of the viewpoints being considered was created by "a fancy auto-complete" as some haters like to say
It doesn’t understand things the way humans do, but saying it doesn’t know anything at all isn’t quite accurate either. This thing was trained on the entire internet and your grandma’s diary. You simply don’t absorb that much data without some kind of learning taking place.
It’s not a knowledge machine, but it does have a sort of “world model” that’s emerged from its training data. It “knows” what happens when you throw a stone through a window or put your hand in boiling water. That kind of knowledge isn’t what it was explicitly designed for - it’s a byproduct of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information.
It’s not as knowledgeable as the AI companies want you to believe - but it’s also not as dumb as the haters want you to believe either.
AI chat bots don't have their own opinions. All they do is regurgitate other opinions, and you have no idea the motivation for how those opinions are weighted.
How is that any different than you. Objectively prove to everyone here than none of your opinions have ever been influence by anything youve ever seen, read or heard.
As i said in other comments, none of that matters. The point is to gather ideas that you otherwise might not have come across. And also as said already, ai generated opinion pieces should never be the only opinions you hear.
There’s a certain irony in people reacting in an extremely predictable way - spewing hate and criticism the moment someone mentions AI - while seemingly not realizing that they’re reflexively responding to a prompt without any real thought, just like an LLM.
A tool isn’t bad just because it doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You just take that into account and adjust how you use it. Hammer isn't a scam just because it can't drive in screws.
Beautifully put
Anyone who has an immediate kneejerk reaction the moment someone mentions AI is no better than the people they’re criticizing. Horseshoe theory applies here too - the most vocal AI haters are just as out of touch as the people who treat everything an LLM says as gospel.
here's my kneejerk reaction: my prime minister is basing his decisions partly on the messages of an unknown foreign actor, and sending information about state internals to that unknown foreign actor.
whether it's ai or not is a later issue.
Absolutely incorrect. Bullshit. And horseshoe theory itself is largely bullshit.
(Succinct response taken from Reddit post discussing the topic)
"Horseshoe Theory is slapping "theory" on a strawman to simplify WHY there's crossover from two otherwise conflicting groups. It's pseudo-intellectualizing it to make it seem smart."
This ignores the many, many reasons we keep telling you why we find it dangerous, inaccurate, and distasteful. You don't offer a counter argument in your response so I can only assume it's along the lines of, "technology is inevitable, would you have said the same if the Internet?" Which is also a fallacious argument. But go ahead, give me something better if I assume wrong.
I can easily see why people would be furious their elected leader is abdicating thought and responsibility to an often wrong, unaccountably biased chat bot.
Furthermore, your insistance continues to push an acceptance of AI on those who clearly don't want it, contributing to the anger we feel at having it forced upon us
You opened with a flat dismissal, followed by a quote from Reddit that didn’t explain why horseshoe theory is wrong - it just mocked it.
From there, you shifted into responding to claims I never made. I didn’t argue that AI is flawless, inevitable, or beyond criticism. I pointed out that reflexive, emotional overreactions to AI are often as irrational as the blind techno-optimism they claim to oppose. That’s the context you ignored.
You then assumed what I must believe, invited yourself to argue against that imagined position, and finished with vague accusations about me “pushing acceptance” of something people “clearly don’t want.” None of that engages with what I actually said.
If someone says they got a second opinion from a physician known for being wrong half the time would you not wonder why they didn’t choose someone more reliable for something as important as their health? AI is notorious for providing incomplete, irrelevant, heavily slanted, or just plain wrong info. Why give it any level of trust to make national decisions? Might as well, I dunno…use a bible? Some would consider that trustworthy.
I often ask ChatGPT for a second opinion, and the responses range from “not helpful” to “good point, I hadn’t thought of that.” It’s hit or miss. But just because half the time the suggestions aren’t helpful doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s not doing the thinking for me - it’s giving me food for thought.
The problem isn’t taking into consideration what an LLM says - the problem is blindly taking it at its word.
What a stupid fucking thing to admit. Let's hope he's out on his ass next election.
You can see it on this government policies
I would genuinely have more trust in a politician consulting I Ching than ChatGPT - at least the book of changes requires some thinking and interpretation, fucking hell...
Sigh, all the tech-bros that convinced the general public that AI are in any way intelligent or that they can think, reason or understand concepts like truth/lies or right/wrong should go on trial for crimes against humanity...
Most people don’t care whether AI is intelligent, can it think or reason or understand concepts. What matters is that it can give helpful replies, and it does that a lot. In my experience maybe 1 reply out of 10 is seriously flawed, others are either mostly helpful or just tell me something I already knew until I reprompt for more, which, again, also works well most of the time (especially when you allow it to search for more information online). So if you wanted to say it’s dangerous in some ways, this is definitely not the proper way to say it, since neither it being dangerous nor it being right or wrong or helpful or useless has anything to do with intelligence, ability to think, reason, feel, comprehend or whatever.
Oh no man does research of course Americans are upset here lmao
Asking an llm isn't research, he might as well have been consulting a magic 8 ball.
Sounds like you have a skill issue
What a treasonist piece of shit.
europe is fucking doomed
Because of this one incident. Good how you figured it out. So much smarter than the rest. ... Get. out.
"That's right voters I'm spineless and have no original ideas" -every politician
Meanwhile the American president uses no intelligence at all. Artificial or otherwise