The Department for Education (DfE) could soon be able to use artificial intelligence to draft responses to as much as 80% of its external communications.
Plans published by the Cabinet Office, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Government Digital Service in December revealed details of the DfE's Communication Drafting Tool.
Plans say the system will reduce the time it takes to draft responses to external communications from 30 minutes to just one minute.
This “creates an opportunity to prioritize more complex and high-priority work” and is “hoped to improve the department's reputation for responding to external inquiries.”
The station reported school week This tool will help support several types of public communications since the beginning of this year. It is unclear whether it will be used to respond to formal complaints.
But digital safety campaigners have warned that the tools cannot reproduce the “nuance and sensitivity required to respond to a human being”, and the Public Commercial Service Union has called on the government to protect workers' jobs.
This tool uses Microsoft's Open Azure AI and can be used to create initial responses to external queries.
Staff must check the text
The AI searches for relevant documents and information before creating an answer in the form of an email template.
Staff members should see the text and can edit it before copying and pasting.
According to the plan, the Azure model will provide “extra security” compared to other large-scale language models, but open-source LLMs that scan the internet rather than uploaded documents are not approved.
The next phase of the rollout will include uploading approximately 400 documents to the system.
The government says it expects the tool will eventually be able to respond to 80% of the DfE's monthly queries.
The impact assessment, completed in November 2023, did not raise any concerns about the tool's design, but the DfE said there was a risk of illusions (misleading information or information presented as fact) which could affect accuracy.
This model has been developed to only extract information from the input data, which should reduce the risk of such hallucinations.
If the query is not related to a topic in the model's data, by default a message is displayed stating that the query is not available.
DfE silent on job cuts
The DfE did not respond to questions. school week Whether the implementation of the model will lead to headcount reductions.
But he said AI “has the power to transform the way we live and work, and like many organizations, we are leveraging AI and technology across government to improve efficiency.”
The current use of AI to help answer public inquiries has “improved efficiency, reduced response times and improved resource allocation.”
According to the plan, the model “creates an opportunity to prioritize more complex and high-priority work” and “is expected to, in turn, enhance the department's reputation for responding to external inquiries.”
But Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public Service Union, which represents civil servants, said the use of AI “must improve the lives of workers and improve public services”.
“We are calling on government departments and independent bodies to protect employees and the public from potential harm, ensure accountability and strengthen trade union rights regarding AI.”
“Who benefits the most? It might turn out to be the work of that AI company.
Jen Parson, director of Defend Digital Me, questioned whether the plan would “actually solve the problem”.
“The idea that text generators can do the thinking that incorporates the nuance and sensibility needed to respond to humans is often misguided. The time and effort required to draft correspondence is rarely reduced.”
“There are questions to consider regarding liability, confidentiality, stability and security,” Persson said.
“I think once you look at the independent research, you feel like it helps overall, but when you look at it in terms of who benefits the most, you might find it's not the budget, the public servants, the public interest, but the AI companies.”
According to the House of Commons Library report, AI is already being used in various government departments.
The DfE is also experimenting with an AI tool to help teachers by pooling government documents such as curriculum guidance and lesson plans, and Ofsted is testing an AI tool to predict which schools are likely to underperform.
