Italian senator reads AI-generated speech in parliament ‘to stir debate’

An Italian senator has surprised his colleagues by reading out in parliament a speech drafted by a chatbot, saying afterwards that he pulled the stunt to stir “a serious debate” on risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence.

“How many of us today are able to distinguish between a text produced by human intelligence and a stream of thoughts produced by an artificial intelligence algorithm?” centrist senator Marco Lombardo asked colleagues.

His speech, on the subject of various bilateral deals with Switzerland, was produced by Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4 chatbot, the senator told Reuters on Thursday.