Mark Sewards

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) for securing this timely debate. In August, I created the first AI prototype of a British MP. It was made by my constituent, Jeremy Smith, who ran an AI start-up in my constituency. I will go to almost any lengths to support a local business in Leeds South West and Morley. This was an online MP that anyone could talk to at any time. Jeremy said my constituents would benefit from two versions of me, including one that never sleeps—although, with children aged four and one, I am not sure that is a useful distinction. Questions were converted into text and an answer generated quickly, and then it was turned into my voice for the users. The replica was impressive, although I did sound a bit too posh and angry when I did not know the answer. AI Mark not only had my voice—we also fed it my policy stances and typical casework answers. I saw it as a clever voicemail system designed to handle common casework queries when my office was closed; it was never going to be a replacement for me or for my excellent casework team. However, how does it relate to safety? We have all seen AI models that break, say outrageous things or hallucinate. We created what I called the “guardrails”, and these were the limits on what AI Mark could say. That created a problem: when the guardrails were lower, AI Mark was very interesting to talk to. He would create Tinder dating profiles on demand; he did write incorrect haikus about the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage); and he did give the population of Vietnam—and try to predict the weather there, too.