When former transport secretary and Andy Burnham ally Louise Haigh wrote an article on economic policy for the journal Renewal last month, Kremlinologists seized on it to get a feel for how the King of the North planned to use his new fiscal levers once ensconced in Downing Street.
With suggestions that capital gains tax might be brought closer to income tax rates, the loosening of fiscal rules and the “imperial” Treasury being reined in, talk was that a Burnham government might favour a more overtly social democratic approach.
But whereas initially people wondered how much Haigh was writing on behalf of Burnham, a new question has arisen – who, or what, might have been writing it on behalf of Haigh?
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Archie Hall, a journalist at the Economist, has claimed that the article has all the hallmarks of having been written by AI. Not only has an AI detection tool, Pangram, concluded with “high confidence” that only 6% of the article was written by Haigh, but a glaring glitch at its conclusion – since removed in the online version – appears to show where a specific change request was made to the AI by the writer.
The original version of the article by the MP for Sheffield Heeley concluded: “So, whether it’s the council tax bill, income, corporation or inheritance tax, we need to make sure that our tax system, across the board, is fair, incentivises work and encourages’ with ‘is fair, incentivises work, and encourages productive economic growth.”
The awkward error – comparable to Jeremy Corbyn saying “strong message here” when reading a speech from an autocue at the 2015 Labour party conference – suggests a command to replace one sentence with another has accidentally been left in the final version, making the sentence nonsensical.
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Posting on X, Hall wrote: “The document is almost certainly largely AI-written. Worse, there is actually a visible artifact of what looks like AI copy-and-paste at the bottom of the essay, where the author seems to be asking a model to replace one sentence with another.
“I don’t doubt these are Haigh’s ideas, but undisclosed outsourcing of political writing to AI is bad practice, and the muddled prose it generates does a disservice to the public conversation.” The error appears to have been corrected online by Renewal on Tuesday.
It’s certainly awkward for Haigh, who is widely tipped for a big cabinet job under Burnham when he takes the reins of office next month. Although not, presumably, as secretary of state for science, innovation and technology.
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