AI bot useful for speeches, says Peterborough mayor

Nick Sandford says ChatGPT has helped him with civic talks

A city's mayor has admitted using artificial intelligence (AI) to help write his speeches, and said it had "massive potential for the council".

Liberal Democrat Nick Sandford, elected as Peterborough mayor in May, said he used ChatGPT to help at civic events.

"Chatbots" use huge amounts of data online to create convincing human-like responses to user queries.

The city council said it would draw up an AI strategy as well as ethical guidelines for its use in future.

Mr Sandford said before one particular event, he "got some information from the council's PR team and put it into ChatGPT... and it composed a speech for me". 

OpenAI is the Microsoft-backed creator of ChatGPT, used by the mayor

"You have to tweak it a bit because it can be quite American," he said.

"But there's massive potential for the council, using AI in an innovative way."

OpenAI is the Microsoft-backed creator of ChatGPT, used by the mayor.

• What is AI and how does it work?

The tool is trained on information from the internet and can answer questions from users.

It has been used to write marketing copy, computer code and songs, among other things.

A spokesperson for Peterborough City Council confirmed it had "several programmes of work looking at [the use of AI] across all areas of the business including customer service, information governance and social care". 

"This is an exciting path for the council and the use of AI brings immense potential for improving services by speeding up processes and providing smooth and quicker services to the public," the spokesperson said.

He added the council was still at an "early and exploratory" stage.

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