Meta admits it’s using Kiwis’ content to train its AI. Image / 123rf
One of the Government’s few forays into artificial intelligence is revealed as extremely modest in scale. Meta admits it’s using Kiwis’ content to train its AI. And embattled e-scooter operator Beam offloads its surplus stock for a song.
No one can accuse Callaghan Innovation chief executive Stefan Korn of overselling ‘GovGPT’, an AI chatbot that will appear on various Crown websites from next month - “to help Kiwis easily find information about the government and its agencies”.
When the Herald posted a story last week on the launch event, hosted by Technology Minister Judith Collins, a number of tech veterans left comments - with many wanting to know more. Korn was candid in filling in the blanks - and framing the scope of the project in response to critics.
“This looks like a government marketing exercise to show we’re in the game,” Arron Judson posted.
Korn responded: “The tool is built and it works. It’s super simple - every journey starts with the first step. We just wanted to get going.”
“Did Callaghan do the work themselves or did they get a company to create it for them?” Shane Gibson asked.
“It was done internally by three people on top of their day jobs in less than 100 hours. It’s a POC [proof-of-concept],” Korn replied.
There’s no extra funding or resources for the ongoing project.
The goal is that anyone will be able to ask GovGPT a conversational question. The AI will then pull information from various Government websites, collate it and summarise it, and deliver plain English (or te reo Māori answers) that are like “chatting to a mate”.
That’s the dream. For now, GovGPT has been trained on a small sub-sample of government sites catering to small businesses. It’s a modest, practical, low-key start.
“It’s using [OpenAI] ChatGPT 4o and RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] on top of a ringfenced data storage that is based on publicly available information on government websites.”
In plainer English, that means GovGPT has had no special AI training - which would have taken thousands of hours rather than the sub-100 Korn described.
“We’ve kept it simple. There’s potentially some training we’d want to do when this goes beyond a POC though! We’re using our [government] data, indexed and chunked using Azure Search [a Microsoft cloud platform],” Callaghan Innovation solution architect Richard Atkinson said.
There was a suggestion that Callaghan should have turned to avatar from the New Zealand-founded Soul Machines, but the struggling firm now sells chatbots based on ChatGPT 4o - a power shift akin to when Yellow Pages Group became a Google Ad Words reseller.
Korn was also asked why the project wasn’t put out to tender.
He replied: “For us to award a contract to another organisation we have to go through a competitive procurement process. A standard RFP [request for proposals] process costs a minimum of $50,000 on the government side and costs each company responding a few days of work.
“So if we had tendered this out, the total cost to the New Zealand economy would have probably been $250,000 to award a contract to a single company for a total contract value of perhaps $20,000 or $35,000. Every company who bid for it would be annoyed except the one who got the contract.”
Korn hoped to be able to involve start-ups, and others on the local AI scene, as the project evolved.
Callaghan will also lead the new “AI Activator” programme, also announced by Collins, in collaboration with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and Niwa. It will point the private sector to AI expertise, R&D resources, AI tools for businesses and learning modules.
Like GovGPT, the Activator is being pulled together within existing funding and resources (remembering that each agency has just taken a 7 to 8% haircut) - a stark contrast to across the Tasman where A$102 million ($111m) was earmarked by the federal Government to help small-to-medium businesses adopt AI.
Across the Tasman, Meta told a senate inquiry last week that data from its Facebook and Instagram platforms, posted from 2007 onwards, has been used to train its AI, with no option for its users to opt out of the programme.
Is Kiwi Facebook and Instagram users’ content also used to train Meta’s AI?
In short, yes. There’s only an opt-out for Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union, where privacy laws are stricter.
“While we don’t currently have an opt-out feature for publicly shared posts, we’ve built in-platform tools that allow people to delete their personal information from chats with Meta AI across our apps,” a Meta spokeswoman told the Herald. Private posts are not fed into Meta’s AI. People can indirectly opt-out by making their account private.
One of our watchdogs is sniffing around, but without any investigation at this point.
“The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has received inquiries regarding Meta’s practices and is monitoring the Australian media reports concerning Meta’s data scraping,” a spokesman said.
“Meta is an agency under the Privacy Act 2020 and is expected to comply with New Zealand privacy law, including the provisions relating the collection and use of personal information and whether that information is publicly available, or not.
“The Privacy Commissioner has issued guidance about AI and the NZ Privacy Act. International data protection authorities have signalled in a joint statement that social media companies need to comply with their obligations to protect personal information from data-scraping,” the spokesman said.
It’s a grey area, without any test cases, swinging on what constitutes public data.
But even if a social platform breaks the rules, sanctions are modest.
“The maximum fine I can issue to an organisation for not adhering to a compliance order is $10,000,” Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster noted in a speech to the National Cyber Security Summit in Wellington in March.
“Compare that to Australia, where their maximum fine for serious interference with privacy is $50 million, and you begin to see the issue.”
There are no current plans to tighten the Privacy Act 2020.
Beam Mobility has been selling older e-scooters in its fleet for years. When it recently had its licence cancelled in Auckland and Wellington over fraud allegations, it knocked around a third off its previous price and started selling the ex-rentals for $399.
Now, Auckland and Wellington customers can pick one up for $299.
All of the e-scooter operators have customised designs (mostly from Segway). Beam says the retail equivalent is the Segway Ninebot G30, which sells for up to $1500 new.
Beam’s pain is your gain. It’s used scooters have gone from $699 (pre losing Auckland licence) to $499 and now $399 https://t.co/eFzBjIOsZx pic.twitter.com/WpzkLFTHtm
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) September 13, 2024
An e-scooter from Beam (or Lime or any other operator) costs $1 to unlock then 50c a minute, so the economics can be compelling if you rent one as part of your commute.
There’s a four-month warranty, and condition and battery vary. You can do a pre-purchase inspection. The price includes a charger (and a warning not to charge it in a garage or somewhere outside your home and not to leave it charging overnight. Like any e-scooter, there’s a fire risk if it’s left charging after the four hours or so it takes to top-up).
It becomes your e-scooter, so there are none of the GPS-enforced speed or parking restrictions that apply to rentals, so you can zip along at up to 25km/h.
If Beam is not around in the future, PB Tech offers Segway maintenance.
I picked up one earlier on this programme, and got a couple of good years use out of it despite a harsh life of lashing it to the back of a saltwater ferry each day and I’ve just gone back for another.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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