Sir Humphrey Appleby makes yet another appearance here on the Coffee Shop forum

[whole diary]

[Chris from Nailsea]

From the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page):

Yes, Minister character is government's new AI assistant


Sir Humphrey Appleby was played by Sir Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister

Government workers will soon be given access to a set of tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI), named after a scheming parliamentary official from the classic sitcom Yes, Minister.

The government says the assistants - called Humphrey - will "speed up the work of civil servants" and save money by replacing cash that would have been spent on consultants.

But the decision to name the AI after Sir Humphrey Appleby, a character described as "devious and controlling", has raised eyebrows.

Tim Flagg, chief operating officer of trade body UKAI, said the name risks "undermining" the government's mission to embrace the tech.

Science and technology secretary Peter Kyle will announce more digital tools later on Tuesday, including two apps which will store government documents, including digital driving licenses.

The announcement is part of the government's overhaul of digital services and comes after their AI Opportunities Action Plan announced last week.

"Humphrey for me is a name which is very associated with the Machiavellian character from Yes, Minister," says Mr Flagg from UKAI, which represents the AI sector. "That immediately makes people who aren't in that central Whitehall office think that this is something which is not going to be empowering and not going to be helping them."

Most of the tools in the Humphrey suite are generative AI models - in this case, technology which takes large amounts of information and summarises it in a more digestible format - to be used by the civil service.

Among them is Consult, which summarises people's responses to public calls for information.  The government says this is currently done by expensive external consultants who bill the taxpayer "around £100,000 every time."

Parlex, which the government says helps policymakers search through previous parliamentary debates on a certain topic, is described by The Times, as "designed to avoid catastrophic political rows by predicting how MPs^▸ (Member of Parliament) will respond".

Other changes announced include more efficient data sharing between departments.

"I think the government is doing the right thing," says Mr Flagg. "They do have some good developers - I have every confidence they are going to be creating a great product."

[Richard Fairhurst]

Mr Flagg from UKAI should perhaps get a sense of humour.

[didcotdean]

Sir Humphrey spent the last years of his life at St Dymphna's Hospital for the Elderly Deranged. Maybe appropriate for AI which still too often when straying outside its training material has a tendency to produce nonsense albeit eloquent & plausible.

[Witham Bobby]

Yes, yes, yes, I do see that there is a real dilemma here. In that, while it has been government policy to regard policy as a responsibility of Ministers and administration as a responsibility of Officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy.