Peterborough mayor says he uses ChatGPT to help write speeches and that AI has 'massive potential for the council'

Artificial intelligence (AI) has “massive potential for the council”, Peterborough’s mayor has said – adding that he’s used ChatGPT to help write speeches.

Cllr Nick Sandford (Liberal Democrats, Paston and Walton), elected as mayor last May, explained that he’s downloaded the generative AI chatbot onto his phone and that it's come in handy when he’s had to speak at civic events.

Before one particular event, he “got some information from the council’s PR team and put it into ChatGPT,” he explained to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), “and it composed a speech for me”.

“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”.

A spokesperson for Peterborough City Council (PCC) confirmed that it has “several programmes of work looking into its uses 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, but added that it’s still at an “early” and “exploratory” stage.

PCC already uses AI in some of its online services and surveillance operations.

Last year, it confirmed that it uses AI to trawl through CCTV footage to help pinpoint the points at which flytipping occurs.

It has also previously said that it aims to create a new digital platform which uses AI to gather customer feedback as well to use it to make its archive of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests publicly searchable and to defend itself against cyber security attacks.

PCC has said it will draw up an AI strategy as well as ethical guidelines for its use in future but had no update on this when approached for comment by the LDRS.

AI has been growing in popularity and sophistication for several years.

The publication of ChatGPT, which is free to use, in 2022 by OpenAI was a milestone which raised AI’s profile, as was the confirmation that other major companies including Microsoft and Meta were developing their own AI platforms.

AI can take many forms and be utilised for many different tasks, but put simply it’s the name for any process carried out by a computer which appears to replicate human intelligence.

This includes problem solving, analysing data or generating text in such a way that some level of decision-making is replicated in the final product.

It can be used in combination with human intelligence to streamline processes as Cllr Sandford found when writing his speeches.