Technology Minister Judith Collins. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The government's new chatbot, Gov-GPT, aims to help businesses access information, but it will not have the ability to think for itself.
Technology Minister Judith Collins announced the new tool at the Aotearoa AI Summit in Auckland on Wednesday morning, with Callaghan Innovation running a pilot of the chatbot.
Callaghan Innovation chief executive Stefan Korn told Morning Report the chatbot is 'ring-fenced', meaning it can only access information from websites that it is pointed to, currently only about 10 websites.
"It can't access the internet, it can't go to any other website to retrieve information."
Korn said that Gov-GPT cannot make anything up or think for itself, and it can only summarise information and bring things together.
"If you ask it something it doesn't know, it comes back and says 'I don't have any information about that', or if you give it wacky stuff, it usually just comes back and says can I help you with a specific piece of information?"
Korn also discussed the ability for the chatbot to provide citations for the information that it is providing, and believes this feature will quell any fears that it will provide misinformation.
"A really important feature that we put in was to make sure that whenever it provides an answer it also provides the citation for it. So it gives you the link to the website and the page where it found the information in the first place."
Providing citations was different to a lot of other chatbots and giving the citation means users can double check the information for themselves. But it was relying on information currently on government websites.
"Gov-GPT works very similar to chat GPT, it looks and feels the same. You just put in your query then it gives you information about what you want to know."
Korn said that the main ability of the chatbot is that it can converse in a way that humans chat, and it is just an interface that will help people to get the information they need that sometimes sits across multiple websites.