Artificial intelligence (AI) promises opportunities for greater economic efficiency and quality of life around the world, but may also bring new socio-technical challenges and safety risks that governments will need to address, both as regulators and as providers of data.
Governments typically collect and steward a vast amount of high-quality data on their citizens and institutions, from official statistics releases to national archives. Access to government data is incredibly important for AI, not only because of the potential of open government data to catalyse the development of the AI ecosystem but also because of its potential to enhance AI tools like LLM-based chatbots to respond to citizen queries and other public service delivery. While the UK government is currently acting as a data provider for AI in some regards, it is not in others.
Generic large language model capabilities are not enough to provide accurate information to citizens. Improvements could be achieved by making government data AI-ready, but also by investing in LLMs whose functionality has been tailored and audited to ensure it provides accurate, balanced answers. Innovators all over the UK building such tailored solutions should be supported with up-to-date AI-ready government data. We believe the government should ensure equitable access to data by acting as a data provider for AI, and our report outlines a set of actionable recommendations to accomplish this role.
