Bruno Le Maire tested ChatGPT to write a speech “in five minutes”

The former pen of Jacques Chirac, Bruno Le Maire, wrote speeches long before he became Minister of the Economy. He welcomed the “well-structured” result, but insisted on the ethical questions raised.

“Give me a speech about China under Xi Jinping in 2023.” That’s what Bruno Le Maire asked ChatGPT. The Minister of Economy tested OpenAI’s AI script generator, which he found “absolutely amazing”.

During his political career, the minister wrote letters to Dominique de Villepin or Jacques Chirac. So he subjected the program to the exercise he had done himself for years.

Bruno Le Maire explained on the set: “I’ve been given a clever and well-structured speech, in exactly five minutes. Where, twenty years ago, I might have taken three or four hours to deliver that speech.” By C Mediatique, on April 2.

“moral difficulties”

This time saving is a good example of the latest studies pointing to the danger of replacing workers with AI. Worldwide, 300 million jobs must be affected according to a report by US bank Goldman Sachs. In the US, only one out of two companies using ChatGPT has already laid off workers.

This is why the Minister of Economy also returned to the need to regulate this new technology. This, he asserts, “poses many ethical difficulties”. However, he does not want the application to be banned, as happened in Italy.

“I think we have to quickly start thinking about the best possible regulation of ChatGPT that needs to be implemented at the national and European level,” considers Bruno Le Maire.

“It would be less fun.”

With this, the minister wonders about the “origin of the data,” and about the wages of press articles or researchers “used by these devices.” But also about referring to sources.

On this last point, Bruno Le Maire refers to the realistic montages that have flooded the Internet, in particular that of the Pope in a white tunic. The minister lamented “It wouldn’t be much funny when you had a political figure who would be forced to make racist or homophobic statements, without specifying that it was a montage.”

Such a video has already seen the light of day in the United States. On TikTok, a fake person made racist remarks to a high school principal.

But in parallel with the supervision, Bruno Le Maire also insists on the “development” of companies and research in this field. “We have researchers in France, CNRS, CEA, and a certain number of start-ups that have extraordinary competence in this field,” he asserts. And to add: “How to do to accelerate their development, this is another topic close to my heart.”