KASSIE MACKAY | Politics
AI PM
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced on Friday that he would spend the 5th of February in Waitangi being yelled at, but would head back toward the Bombays for Waitangi Day itself. Shortly after news of his decision emerged, so too did claims that the PM’s Waitangi itinerary came straight from a ChatGPT data centre.
An anonymous staffer at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet alleges that for the entire month of January, all staff within the department were seconded into specialised roles, entirely dedicated to developing and inputting AI prompts.
Our source initially thought the surprise secondment must have been a new strategy for driving productivity. However, it took mere minutes to realise the real rationale for the re-deployment.
“We were given little instruction books with exemplar prompts that were supposed to inform our own, but they weren’t anything related to what we normally do,” our secret source explained, omitting information on what exactly she normally does.
“They were all like, ‘places for pakeha to hang out in February’ and ‘how to not be a racist in February’ and, ‘friendly Maoris near me.’”
Exasperated, our source exclaimed, “this is not what I am qualified to do!”
Chest rising and falling rapidly, our increasingly stressed source explained that, “a community event could be anything. I don’t even know what community this event is supposed to be with, I just asked Chat GPT to give me some euphemisms for groups of non-white people and that’s what it gave me!”
Other staff members at the Department have declined to respond to these allegations but an OIA request did reveal that the Prime Minister’s search history included a Google search for “top AI prompts to sound more like the prime minister of a country.”
More to come.
