The Romanian Prime Minister has just presented the very first artificial intelligence in the world to become a government adviser. Called Ion, it was designed to analyze social networks in order to convey the opinions of Romanian citizens.
Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă created a surprise this Wednesday by unveiling a “ new honorary advisor “. Called Ion, it is an artificial intelligence (AI) designed to inform the government in real time about the wishes of the population. The AI was developed by the start-up Humains.ai, in collaboration with researchers and teachers.
Ion displays a futuristic air thanks to a mirror used as a screen. She also gives her answers orally with a synthetic voice, and commands herself with the voice. The AI is responsible for analyzing publicly available information on social media to determine the general opinion in the country. The name Ion comes from the word ” we “, We in Romanian, written in mirror.
Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă demonstrates the operation of Ion, an AI that is the “new honorary adviser” (video only in Romanian). © Euronews Romania
Will the new counselor be prone to hallucinations?
In addition to social networks, Romanians will also be able to transmit their ideas, opinions and grievances to Ion via a dedicated website (ion.gov.ro), as well as in some physical locations. However, they will not receive a response from the AI. It will use deep neural networks to detect and prioritize topics of interest on social media before communicating them to the government. Currently, Ion only understands written information, but its developers intend to develop it little by little and in particular teach it how to extract data from audio and video, for example for videos on TikTok.
While AIs are able to analyze large amounts of information, the results are not always reliable. In particular, they tend to hallucinate and present erroneous results at times, as Internet users have seen with ChatGPT. It remains to be seen if Ion will also be prone to drifts, which would be much more problematic if the Romanian government makes decisions based on its information…
