Key Defense speeches this year appear to have been fully AI-generated: Analysis

The minister and state secretary of defense delivered speeches this year that appear to have been almost fully written by artificial intelligence, according to an analysis by Nieuwsuur, based on 77 speeches by cabinet officials. Defense Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz and State Secretary Derk Boswijk were flagged more often than others for AI use in speeches.

The Defense Ministry denies that AI is used to generate complete speeches and says it is only used as a tool.

According to NOS, Tom Dobber, an associate professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam, identified a lot of suspicious sentence constructions in the texts. “Awkward and hollow language, a bit empty. And really typical AP phrasing,” Professor said.

De Volkskrant reported on Friday that hundreds of posts by PM Rob Jetten on social media were written by AI. That was discovered using a software program, Pangram.

“Pangram is a promising program for detecting AI-generated text,” Dobber said. “The early results suggest it is highly accurate. "Pangram basically assigns a score to a text. The higher the score, the more suspicious the text is.”

Niuwsuur reportedly confronted Boswijk earlier with passages from a speech he delivered this summer at Keto Koti, the commemoration of the Dutch slavery past. According to Pangram, the speech was 95 percent AI-generated. Boswijk responded that he did not know how that was possible. “It is a fairly personal speech. I still remember the structure well because I came up with it myself.”

Yeşilgöz declined to give an interview to Niuwsuur, but a Defense Ministry spokesperson later said that defense speechwriters use AI as a tool, “for example, to look up a synonym. Just as many Dutch people do. AI is not used to generate an entire speech.”

On Friday, Yeşilgöz said it was “absolutely not true” that her speeches are written by artificial intelligence. “It may be that a speech occasionally goes through a spelling check and a check on sentence structure,” the minister said.

PM Jetten has previously said about his AI-written social media posts that he and the D66 see no problem with using AI. The tool is used "from time to time to make the work a little easier," he said. "Using AI as a tool does not mean that human eyes are not still looking it over."