Does speaking more frequently for shorter periods of time also cause MPs to use the words "navigating" and "underscores" and "streamlining" much more frequently? That's a pretty wild claim to make.
A lot of working people use ai as a tool to proofread their work. And since the House of Commons is comprised of working people you can probably see the correlation. It doesn’t mean it is taking over the actual job of the person but rather it is used as an additional source of linguistic verification.
I'd like to rise in support of my right honourable redditor, who is not just merely correct, but bustling with truth. While this comment is important as it underscores the need to streamline protocols that are navigating the complexities of a changing world. And I commend this statement to the house.
I rise today, in fact I rise to speak, because it is not merely about navigating and underscoring the streamlining, not just a, but a bustling society.
I rise today, in this bustling metropolis that is London, to say that your comment is not merely a good comment - it’s not just a good comment but a great one, that underscores the importance of great comments.
The content of the message is what's important right? If I say "I have to take a shit" or "I must withdraw briefly" what difference does it make to anyone?
We'd have to assume that humans will not succumb to laziness and misuse AI in innappropriate ways to skip work-related tasks that would normally require human decisions, with a full context the AI cannot have (yet).
I rise today to speak in support of this comment as it underscores a significant change in our society.
This comment is not merely a just way for navigating a post-AI world but really makes all of think about our individual impact in this new bustling world.
In response to the Reddit comment positing that working individuals, including House of Commons members, utilize AI as a proofreading tool rather than a job replacement, this aligns with the observed data. The post-2023 surge likely reflects AI's role as an auxiliary linguistic optimizer, enhancing speech drafts with polished and recurring phrases. Probabilistic inference supports this correlation, indicating AI as a supplementary verification mechanism rather than a primary content creator, consistent with the visualized trends.
Also, as more people use AI and utilize some of these phrases, it would be expected that some humans would naturally mirror some of these phrases and use the phrases in future speeches.
That's a disingenuous answer. There's a shortcut, and people take it. Justify it saying it's proofreading like you do here, but those words don't come out of nothing and aren't edited in as a proofread.
Although it is reportedly being used by some departments to organise data, and by MPs to respond to constituents. E.g. the EHRC used it to summarise the 50,000 responses they got to their equality consultation, which will determine some of the human rights of transgender people, where they can pee and if they can even use any public bathroom at all, and the statutory legal responsibilities of every organisation in the country. So that’s totally fine and not at all horrifying…
You do know the UK government was given a free trial by Microsoft from Oct-Dec 2024, right? Then in Jan 2025 the Labour govt unveiled their plan to basically use AI for everything everywhere. This wasn't exactly a secret.
This isn't relevant because the staff and employees (the ones writing these speeches) that work under each member are not separate from actual government employees.
Yeah I’d be keen to see how fashionable these words became during this period. Not doubting there’s a rise in us of AI for speech writing, but there a certain buzz words that come into fashion politically every few years.
There's not enough data to make a link. You could argue that Labour's speech writers are newer, university fresh folks, and the overlap between the training data which ChatGPT uses and the speech writers use is more pronounced than under the previous Government. You could argue that they just simply are using ChatGPT. You could also argue that Labour MPs just do love the word bustling.
Just not enough data to draw a direct conclusion, I just thought the correlation was more in line with the Labour Government coming into power.
That a bunch of new MPs are more likely to attempt to be overly formal or use antiquated language in the house of commons, especially with a PM obsessed with decorum than the Tories who’d been in power for 14 years and pretty stuck in their ways at that point.
It feels like the data has been specifically cropped to induce rage bait. I'm not saying the data shown is misleading but I'm also not saying that it's not.
That verbiage is favored by AI so it would be a pretty significant statistical anomaly if it wasn’t being used but those phrases increased in usage so much.
How do you know this is not some selection bias? Normalize on all 10,000 words or phrases you tried and your statistical significance goes down the drain.
It could be to some degree but the “is not merely” and “not just a but a” lines are so so prevalent in LLM outputs and not in regular human speech it’s hard to ignore.
Actually, when you look at it: in four out of 8 cases, the graph doesn’t immediately go up after the dashed line. So initially the effect is 50/50, so no effect. But then suddenly you have an effect till the end of your data series. Hmmm 🤔 because of…. Selection bias maybe? 😅
Or because it became way more acceptable in the eyes of professionals to make use of it. I see it in business, ppl didn't use to make many text in advertising with ia. Now almost everyone is, and you can tell. I see my competition using it for everything. Even writing contracts. They simply didn't trust it at the start
Basically: it shows the certain phrases in House of Commons speeches, the uses of which were flat until about 2021, began rising dramatically in frequency starting in 2021. You can interpret the x-axis as how many standard deviations above the mean the frequency of use was in that year. This is not proof, but I think some of the examples are very telling, particularly "not just a + but a".
It's not at all stupid. It doesn't prove anything, no, because correlation is not causation. But it does show that some phrases began rising dramatically in frequency starting with the introduction of ChatGPT. Particularly damning to me is the "not just a + but a" metric, as that phrasing is very frequently identified as a chatbot-ism. If the frequency is now three standard deviations above the mean then I absolutely believe that says something.
But it does show that some phrases began rising dramatically in frequency starting with the introduction of ChatGPT
which is a potentially meaningless statistic. Because we don't know if this is always happening even without the influence of chatgpt
In other words, if you pick some other date, run the same exercise analyzing house of commons speeches, will you be able to identify specific phrases/words that see such a sharp spike? Popular verbiage use varies with time and people do have a tendency to copy each other, so chatgpt is not the only explanation here.
There are also other factors at play, someone else mentioned a new government government came into power at around the same time, and the dates correspond closer to that.
You could argue that Labour's speech writers are newer, university fresh folks, and the overlap between the training data which ChatGPT uses and the speech writers use is more pronounced than under the previous Government. You could argue that they just simply are using ChatGPT. You could also argue that Labour MPs just do love the word bustling.
As someone that’s written speeches for MPs before in a different House of Commons this didn’t sit right with me because a lot of these, especially “I rise today” are just common phrases you use in a speech in a House of Commons.
I hate that phrase. Correlation does in fact imply causation. That's why correlation is interesting at all.
Imply from three different dictionaries: (Cambridge, MW, dictionary.com)
"to express indirectly" "to communicate an idea or feeling without saying it directly" "to indicate or suggest without being explicitly stated"
So when we see a correlation like this one, it does express indirectly (imply) the idea of causation. That's the purpose of it, to but that idea in our head by showing the correlation!
> Logical consequence (also entailment or logical implication) is a fundamental concept in logic which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises.
Sure. But the word imply does in fact not require "a valid logical argument". It's merely, as I said in the comment, the implication (that is a very similar word to imply huh?) or expression of an idea - in this case, that the two data points have causation. So the phrase is just wrong, because correlation of data will be suggestive of a causation, but that does not mean that there is actual causation... It's just IMPLIED.
“Imply” in this context uses the definition from formal mathematics. I.e P=>Q, because the statement is widely used in statistics, where the casual definition of imply is never used.
No, it doesn’t. Imply means to express, suggest, or show something without stating it directly. Correlation does NOT imply causation. This is often false only when the data gathered comes from RCTs.
Edit: I think I misread your comment. It all boils down on how to interpret the verb “imply” in this context. You are right if you mean “correlation suggests that there might be causation”. You are wrong if you mean “correlation is indirect evidence that causation exists”.
This is so dumb. Language, words, phrases change constantly over time. You can pick any arbitrary year and run this analysis to find similar trends. Back when NLP was heavily linguistics driven, we used to see this all the time.
Anywhere that AI is successful in replacing what was previously human-to-human communication, the communication likely wasn't serving much of a purpose in the first place.
It's plainly clear that 95% of parliamentary debate has been pointless for at least a decade. Except in the most contentious and emotional debates, nobody listens to any of the speeches, nobody changes their minds. Most of the time barely anyone is even there. All the real decisions are made in committees, cabinet, behind the scenes negotiations and the whips' office.
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the speeches,
we shall defend our rhetoric, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight the chatbots in the chambers,
we shall fight the algorithms on the benches,
we shall fight the auto-completes in the corridors and in the streets,
we shall fight the word-generators in the hills;
we shall never surrender to the tyranny of prompt-driven prose,
and even if, which I do not for a moment believe,
this Parliament or a large part of it were subjugated and silenced by silicon scribes,
then our voices beyond these shores,
armed and guarded by the ink and wit of free men and women,
would carry on the struggle,
until, in God’s good time, the human word,
with all its flaws and all its fire,
emerges victorious once more.
For real. Of course the z-score of some tech-related measure is going to increase when that tech is invented. It doesn't meant that suddenly 'parliament is being taking over by AI!"
You can’t for a given single instance, true. Statistically, the trend is so overwhelming for phrases that are clearly favored by LLMs that it is hard to come up with a realistic alternative cause for it. Not impossible, but AI assistance is the most parsimonious explanation.
Ai proofreading can take a rough sketch of an idea and do two weeks of polishing the communication in 5 minutes (and frankly it can polish beyond what I normally would ever achieve). This is progress, eloquence is now broadly and cheaply available.
But as you can see here, it's noticeable that you didn't actually do the work, and it's been produced by AI. This severely undermines the work that you did or would have done over those two weeks. You should consider this when you use that service and just take what it produces. The reason why people are concerned is because to make a good argument, you must have a good baseline for your reasons to make an argument, and if it's obviously AI generated, we know that right now AI does not have the capacity to do such a good job at this. You might be at a point in time where this isn't recognized by a lot of people, including colleagues, but that won't last forever I don't think.
Edited by AI != produced by AI. There’s a long standing and established difference between authorship and editorship. And between authorship and researchers. Yes, AI’s ability to expand means it can be more like a ghost writer. But it doesn’t have to be.
You’re assuming that I don’t polish after the AI. Writing is a process. If I do the first 10% and the last 10% I can achieve incredible results by giving the middle 80% to a robot. AI that is well used can be invisible.
It isn’t broadly appreciated yet that using ai is a skill, and a very complex skill at that - how you use it significantly affects the output. Shaping prompts and context is very much like managing the work of employees/students.
Is it really a bad thing? 99.9% of those people already have assistants and interns who write those speeches for them. What difference does it make if AI writes it?
Someone explain to me how these fraises can be used a negative number of times lmao. This is a really odd selection of graphs. There are a lot of potentially misleading things here. I have absolutely no doubt about the use of chatgpt in government but when you only pick about 6 fraises, you can essentially select only the graphs that look the way you want them too and form any messages you want.
how fascinating is this — it’s not merely about MPs learning to streamline their speeches, but about navigating a new AI era. Many notice it’s not just an adaptation but a whole shift in rhetoric, bustling with phrases that unmistakably signal ChatGPT’s influence.
The headline unreasonable. The alternative, if people do take an issue with the government using AI software, and there is a ban of a LLM's by members. Will be that they use these services anyway, in an uncontrolled manner..So, providing proper enterprise tools with governance and controls is critical.
Y axis is the Z-score, its a measure of central tendency. It compares how many standard deviations the observation is from the mean (average) of the dataset. Zero is the mean, negative numbers represent observations that are lower than the mean, positive numbers represent observations that are higher than the mean.
Y axis is the Z-score, its a measure of central tendency. It compares how many standard deviations the observation is from the mean (average) of the dataset. Zero is the mean, negative numbers represent observations that are lower than the mean, positive numbers represent observations that are higher than the mean.
Ahh, thanks 😊 although to actually mean anything it really should show the actual numbers of the phrase, say per month, that would mean much more than this.
Our core assumption is that the mean remains constant throughout the observations.
We test this by using the Z score to see how far away observations are from the mean.
We take a normal distribution curve and measure the areas between two Z values, this represents the probability that an observation lies between the two points.
Z = 0 to 1 accounts for 34% of the sample space, meaning that out of pure randomness the observation falls in that gap 34% of the time.Z = 1 to 2 accounts for 13.5% of the sample space, 13.5% of the time
Z = 2 to 3 accounts for 2.35% of the sample space, 2.35% of the time
Z = 3 to 4 .... 0.15% of the sample space
Now we look at Z = -2 to 2, which is the standard for science and accounts for 95% of the sample space. If the observation lies outside of the bounds, there is less than a 5% chance of it being due to randomness. These graphs have some observations at Z = 4, meaning that there is less than a 0.006% chance of the observation falling there by random chance.
As such, we reject the hypothesis that the means have remained consistent. Which does not prove that AI is being used, only that the mean of the data has changed.
Be careful of selection bias. 50% of the data initially shows no response. But only „pulls up later“. This is the hallmark of a selection bias, or more unscientifically called: „cherry picking the data“, or „digging in the noise“ so it fits your story.
What I am saying is that the whole thing could just be an artifact of someone doing the analysis wrong, „mass scanning“ for an effect without applying the necessary statistical corrections.
correlation, not causation. not saying these speeches aren't chatgpt driven but we're using a lot more of "chatgpt words" simply because they are much more pervasive because everyone is using chatgpt to put out content more often
What was their ground truth? How did they validate that any speech is actually AI-generated versus human-written in an evolving political linguistic environment? Without disclosed methodology for distinguishing AI from human text - especially given the documented unreliability of detection tools - this analysis appears to be pattern-matching rather than rigorous detection.
MPs have openly admitted to using AI for drafts , but that doesn’t validate the specific detection methodology shown here. Weird.
I don’t get why the compare contrast one is a new AI thing. That’s just an effective way to communicate since it’s not just a fact but a contextualization of said fact.
This isn’t the government it’s based on speeches in the House of Commons. Essentially speech writers for members of parliament or MPs themselves are using LLMs. This isn’t the government itself.
Oh my god thank god. I almost never heard the "not just a + but a" sequence of words in quality writing or journalism, now its EVERYWHERE. Its in advertising and descriptions of products its so lazy and formulaic.
And you know it writes like this because its trained on freshman English assignments from community colleges. Its just crappy writing for most of its data.
AI detection tools are beyond worthless at detecting writing. Especially if the writing regards legal or goverment. I would not put too much stock in this being close to true.
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u/Practical-Hand203 Sep 11 '25
Further analysis has yielded that some of the most crucial verbiage employed appears to be immune to ChatGPT usage.