The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is using artificial intelligence for a number of cases, including for the prediction of the likelihood of tuberculosis (TB) outbreaks.
The uses of artificial intelligence and the chatbot ChatGPT, in particular, across government departments including the DAFM has been scrutinised by Fine Gael TD Ciaran Cannon.
Deputy Cannon said there are “glaring inconsistencies” in the different approaches by government departments to using artificial intelligence.
The DAFM is among the departments which confirmed its use of ChatGPT. The deputy said there is a “complete inconsistency” in regulating and monitoring the platform’s use.
DAFM
Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue said that the tool was “briefly explored” for answering technical or software-related questions when it was initially launched.
However, the minister stressed that ChatGPT was not used to conduct business and there have been no official meetings held regarding the use of the application.
“It was determined that the tool was of little benefit and was not subsequently used. No data or information was uploaded or shared with the platform,” Minister McConalogue said.
Artificial intelligence is used for the following use cases, which are all subject to human review, data protection and governance measures, within the DAFM:
- Predicting the likelihood of TB outbreaks;
- Image analysis of crops claimed under Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) schemes;
- Image analysis for identifying species susceptible to H5N1 (bird flu);
- Customer segmentation analysis for developing agri-food policies;
- Analysis for identifying risk factors for microbial food safety;
- Smart text analysis to prevent and contain data breaches.
In addition, the Area Monitoring System (AMS) within the DAFM uses machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning to process sentinel satellite data as required by EU regulations.
Around 8,000 farmers have been contacted by the DAFM after potential agri-scheme application issues were detected on their land parcels through the satellite inspection system.
Artificial intelligence
The DAFM takes a risk-based approach to the installation of any application used, and all applications must be used in line with DAFM policies and advice provided by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the minister said.
However, Deputy Cannon is calling for a complete ban on the use of Chat GPT across all government departments until the NCSC has assessed the implications of using the platform and issued the appropriate expert guidance.
“I believe that there may be national security issues arising from the use of ChatGPT, particularly in the inputting of departmental data to produce the desired outputs from the platform.
“Right now we have no idea where that data, some of which could be highly sensitive, is ending up and who exactly has access to it,” Deputy Cannon said.