2024-01-04 05:40:00
Like all content production sectors, Belgian politics is not immune to the irruption of AI into its daily life. Whether in parliaments, in study centers or in ministerial offices, the various software that makes it possible to automatically generate content are already used to speed up a series of tasks. This ranges from writing assistance to the creation of illustrative images, including subtitling, translation or reformulation.
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“Workers sometimes use it to do certain tasks, such as writing a draft response to an e-mail, writing the basis of a parliamentary question or a political speech,” confirms Baptiste Erpicum, press officer at Écolo. Before Christmas, environmentalists used MidJourney to illustrate an Instagram post on end-of-year holiday meals.
“We don’t use ChatGPT to write our speeches, but we use Deepl to translate texts and software to generate subtitles for our videos,” we are told in the office of a federal minister.
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Another Vivaldi minister told us that AI is regularly used when it is necessary to synthesize a four-page speech into a few tweets. Software is also used to make certain expressions of a speech more “punchy” if the eloquence appears weak.
In parliamentary teams, some have adopted these algorithmic aids to digest legal texts with very formalist phrasing or, conversely, so that their writing sticks more to the conventional parliamentary style.
“The use of AI can be interesting for drafting parliamentary texts, to go faster,” explains Jonathan de Patoul (Défi). Last February, the Brussels MP introduced a parliamentary inquiry 90% written with ChatGPT to alert people to the power of the software. He has not repeated the experiment since, but he began to wonder about how these tools could be used by parties to improve their performance. “It’s still a simple reflection, but I think that study centers, which put many works on paper, could have use of these tools. Creating a political program takes time. How could AI help us? This is what we need to investigate.”
“We are considering using AI to more easily integrate subtitles into our video capsules,” attests François Colmant, spokesperson for the MR group in the Chamber, who however does not yet seem convinced by the results. “The generation of subtitles works quite well in English, but it does not yet faithfully reproduce the words of our MPs.”
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At this stage, all the parties consulted agree that AI is still far from replacing the women and men of politics.
First of all, for technical questions. AI can still make mistakes. “It is always necessary to scrupulously check each word and each piece of information after use,” explains Baptiste Erpicum. “In terms of productivity, AI offers the possibility of saving time, but we must remain very careful. We need safeguards,” adds Jonathan de Patoul.
Then, because the AIs have not yet adopted party-specific formulations. “The human side is missing. We come across preformatted speeches, with a lot of commonplaces,” adds François Colmant.
Above all, our interlocutors point out that politics is not just about content production. Before reaching the stage of public declarations, politics is first a matter of closed meetings, bilateral meetings, discussions in the corridors of parliaments, exchanges in private or in public events… In short , human relationships. It is only part of the more formal and administrative phase of their work which is accompanied by algorithms.
Furthermore, some parties are still reluctant to deliver their activities to machines. At the PS, we do not use artificial intelligence “at all”. “We have worked on the question of AI, but rather to point out the abuses,” recognizes Edwine Bodart, spokesperson for the PS group in the Chamber.
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Currently, more than political use, it is first and foremost the cultural and economic consequences which are mentioned in parliaments when it comes to artificial intelligence. “Politically, this is a subject closely followed by Ecolo in parliaments. We also have, at our initiative, hearings planned on the agenda linked to AI in the cultural sector in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation”, supports Margaux De Ré, Member of the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
This is the reason why, within the framework of the Belgian presidency of the European Union, the Parliament of the French Community, the Walloon Parliament and the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region are organizing an interparliamentary Conference on artificial intelligence . Objective ? “Addressing the links that unite, on the one hand, artificial intelligence and, on the other hand, the creative and cultural industry, education, health and public governance.”
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