The Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) has revealed that it is using AI to help governmental departments process and analyse responses to consultations.

The non-ministerial department provides actuarial solutions, including financial risk analysis, modelling and advice, to support the UK public sector.

GAD said that it has used ChatGPT to categorise and analyse around 120 responses for a consultation issued by a central government department, with around half a million words processed through the use of AI.

The program was used to produce an initial summary of the responses that were received, with the department grouping respondents by industry type so that the AI could pick out themes within these groups.

The team fed in responses for each question and instructed ChatGPT to summarise views in a couple of paragraphs. The output was read by an actuary to ensure it reflected a technically correct summary.

The resulting output was sorted into 40 summarised responses relating to one per question from which the department was able to draw out key themes and collate replies.

“While we read all the responses, the AI output was a really useful starting point to analyse the responses to make sure the output was coherently presented,” said actuary Laura Brunton, who worked on the project. “We undertook further editing and were able to ensure that the AI created an initial summarised view which we could use to build in the views of all respondents.”

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