A new poll has found public support for the UK Government’s AI-powered ‘Consult’ tool – which was first used in Scotland on a consultation about lip fillers.
Nesta, the innovation agency, conducted a survey of 144 members of the public to gauge opinion on the tool, which was developed by the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, a technical team within Government Digital Service.
They found people agreed that using the Consult tool will benefit the consultation process and most were comfortable with this use of AI because it ‘focuses on a small part of the consultation process, has human oversight and doesn’t make decisions.’ The poll revealed 60 per cent of people were positive about AI being used in public services, compared to 22 per cent neutral and 18 per cent negative.
People valued that the tool could help UK government departments run consultations more efficiently, but they also wanted to know what the cost-and time-savings would be used for and what ongoing development and maintenance costs would be.
They also came up with their own suggestions for using AI – including using the technology to enhance inclusion by translating responses from different languages or by interpreting handwritten and audio responses.
Participants were much less concerned about the risks posed by Consult compared to risks from AI tools in general. But people weren’t satisfied with the current mitigations described for two tool-specific risks: model manipulation and environmental impact, and wanted to know more about how the Consult team would manage these.
People had lingering concerns that this use of AI could have longer-term impacts on the democratic process. They discussed whether adopting the tool could lead to changes in the number and diversity of responses to government consultations. They also worried that using an AI model developed by a US technology company might lead to political bias, escalating costs or undue influence.
The Scottish Government became the first administration in the UK in May to use an artificial intelligence tool to analyse public responses to consultations – with “promising results”.
Consult, built by the UK government as part of the Humphrey suite of AI tools, was used to speed up analysis of what the public and experts said in a consultation about regulating non-surgical cosmetic procedures, such as lip fillers.
Generative AI was deployed to analyse 2,000 responses to the proposed legislation to regulate treatments like lip fillers and laser hair removal – with the tool providing nearly identical results to officials.
Jenni Minto, the Scottish Government’s public health minister, said: “Using the tool was very beneficial in helping the Scottish Government understand more quickly what people wanted us to hear and our respondents’ range of views. Officials were reassured through the process that the AI was doing a good job, supporting us to undertake the analysis that will inform our next steps.”
Access the report here.