A European prime minister has introduced his Cabinet to what he claims is the world’s first AI government advisor.
Nicolae Ciucă, the Prime Minister of European Union member-state Romania, is said to have caught his own Cabinet off guard on Wednesday after introducing them to their new colleague and advisor — an artificial intelligence named Ion.
The AI is now set to serve within the government as an “honorary advisor”, with the Prime Minister claiming that the new synthetic official is the first of its kind across the world.
According to a report by The Guardian, the AI is said to have greeted its new biological colleagues during the press conference earlier this week.
“Hi, you gave me life and my role is now to represent you, like a mirror,” Ion reportedly said, before asking those in the room what it should know about Romania.
Ion has reportedly been developed by researchers in Romania to “quickly and automatically capture the opinions and desires” of the general public, who will be able to give their views on various issues to the AI through an online website, Twitter account, and even some in-person locations that are due to be announced.
This feedback will then be analysed by the intelligence, who will then provide guidance to government ministers.
“We are talking about the first government adviser to use artificial intelligence,” Ciucă remarked while showing off a physical representation of the creation, which sports a mirror-like chrome screen that can display words and even a pixelated face.
The Prime Minister went on to say that the general public should see it as their “obligation” to communicate with the new AI in order to ensure it is able to quickly and effectively work with the government.
Ion ultimately seems to be just the latest in a growing list of AIs aimed at replacing white-collar workers in various fields, such as journalism and other office professions.
The rapid improvement in AI-generated written content in particular has seen many businesses move to adopt the technology, with both BuzzFeed and Sports Illustrated announcing this year that they would start using AI for consumer content.
Artificial intelligence also appears to be making serious inroads into the legal professions, with the DoNotPay platform having repeatedly attempted to allow its own AI system to fight a legal case in an American courtroom, though this has been resisted heavily by those working in the field.
The technology is not without its problems, however, with history indicating that an AI that has regular contact with the general public can be prone to misbehaving, with Microsoft’s Tay AI chatbot very quickly turning into a Nazi after interacting with a significant number of digital trolls.
Although other chatbots, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, have largely been able to avoid this fate through controversial leftist interference in the way it can respond to people, these next-generation applications have run into a number of hiccups, including them “hallucinating” completely false information which they then end up reporting to users as facts.
It remains to be seen whether Romania’s new AI advisor will fall victim to any of these issues throughout its government service, with it being possible that Ion may not only become the world’s first AI government advisor, but also the world’s first AI government advisor that is forced to resign over a political or social scandal.