Steve Yemm put “a fundamental question” to his fellow MPs this June. “Who is shaping whom? Is technology serving society or is society being reshaped to serve the interests of technology companies?” Onlookers may not have realised quite how intimately technology had shaped that particular intervention. Pangram, a tool for detecting text written by artificial-intelligence models, flagged Mr Yemm’s speech as entirely AI-written.
Unusually, Mr Yemm freely credits his machine co-author. He tells The Economist that “my office uses general-purpose
Steve Yemm put “a fundamental question” to his fellow MPs this June. “Who is shaping whom? Is technology serving society or is society being reshaped to serve the interests of technology companies?” Onlookers may not have realised quite how intimately technology had shaped that particular intervention. Pangram, a tool for detecting text written by artificial-intelligence models, flagged Mr Yemm’s speech as entirely AI-written.
Unusually, Mr Yemm freely credits his machine co-author. He tells The Economist that “my office uses general-purpose AI productivity tools within parliamentary guidelines” for many tasks, including preparing speeches. He is hardly alone.
Our analysis, using Pangram, finds that one in ten of the words spoken in Britain’s parliamentary debates are drafted by AI (see upper chart 1). That share is rising, from near-zero in 2024. Most MPs are less willing to fess up. The most common response of Parliament’s most prolific AI users was surprise and denial. One MP, a quarter of whose speeches appear to be AI-written, denied using the technology at work. He added that he and his parliamentary assistant “do have a bit of a running joke, though, that his writing style often uses some of the AI-generated tropes”.
Britain is not alone. Across English-speaking legislatures, the heaviest AI-users are Australian and Canadian MPs, whose speeches get flagged at triple the rate of British ones (see lower chart 1). American House members are not far behind. The House of Lords, despite its fusty reputation, uses more AI than the Commons. The lowest-AI chambers sampled were the New Zealand House and US Senate.
Rob Jetten, the Dutch prime minister, was embarrassed earlier in September when the Volkskrant, a daily newspaper, revealed that many of his social-media posts, including a plane-crash commemoration and a post-colonial apology, were AI-authored. Mr Jetten was unapologetic and plans to continue. Another recent analysis found that one-third of the laws proposed in Norway’s legislature contained AI text.
For now, AI prose juts out painfully. Chatbots reliably reach for the same few formulas. “It was not simply a tattoo; it was a promise” (said one MP, remembering the Hillsborough stadium disaster); “the government are not reforming NHS dentistry; they are supervising its managed decline” (said another, about dental deserts).
Rather than merely spotting iffy constructions, AI-detection tools are trained on vast databases of text, like the models they sniff out. Pangram now touts just one-in-24,000 false positives. Researchers at the University of Chicago similarly found a “near-zero” error rate on longer text. On parliamentary data, it flags vanishingly few speeches from before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
More than half of British MPs barely use AI for speeches. But those who do tend to be prolific (see chart 2). Many are from the newest intake, first elected in 2024.
The MP who uses AI most, we find, is Neil Shastri-Hurst, a Conservative. Three-quarters of his parliamentary contributions over the past year were flagged as AI-written. Alex Easton, a Northern Irish independent, is not far behind, nor are Mr Yemm or Sarah Hall, both of the Labour Party. Ms Hall said that AI was “an assistant, not...a substitute” and that, for every half hour saved on speechwriting, “that is another 30 minutes we can put into supporting my constituents.”
Among backbenchers, the major party with the highest rate of AI in its speeches is the Liberal Democrats (see chart 3). Speeches by ministers and party leaders, with better-resourced and more-scrutinised speechwriting teams, rarely seem to be AI-written. None by Kemi Badenoch, Andy Burnham, Sir Ed Davey, Nigel Farage, John Healey or Ed Miliband had any material AI input.
That caution is probably wise. Polling for The Economist by Public First, a consultancy, finds that British voters strenuously disapprove of politicians using AI to write, though they are happy for marketers, assistants or even teachers to do so (see chart 4). Voters also disliked AI use in speeches more than any other sort of political writing, even personal notes of condolence to constituents. The next-most-unpopular category was AI-written policy papers, which have also proliferated in Westminster. Each party’s supporters saw sin elsewhere. Labour, Green and Tory backers reckoned that Reform UK’s Mr Farage was the party leader most likely to use AI in speeches; Reform voters guessed it was the Greens’ Zack Polanski.
Neither politicians nor AI are especially popular, so hostility to AI speeches, which combine the two, ought not be a vast surprise. But the public’s ire is understandable. Voters elect representatives to speak for them in Parliament, a word that comes from the French for “talking-shop”. These debates are seldom the summit of oratory. Today there is an unseemly focus on angling for social-media clips, and actual speech-writing is usually left to staff.Still, dodging the work of crafting an argument risks automating away what MPs are elected to do. And concern about robo-prose is not confined to politics.
“Sloppy speechwriting will get sloppy politics,” frets Alan Lockey, once a speechwriter for Sir Keir Starmer, until recently the prime minister. “We disseminate ideas through our writing. This isn’t Google Maps and the Ordnance Survey, this is big-boy stuff now. This is fundamental to our historic culture.”
Futurists have speculated that politics might be the rare impossible-to-automate profession, perhaps like the priesthood. (Although earlier this year the pope did have to urge clergymen not to use AI to write homilies.) Surely people want to be represented by people, not machines? But as time-strapped MPs reach for chatbots, AI is already building a bridgehead.
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