Photo: RNZ
The government is planning to use generative AI to help draft the next New Year's Honours citations.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) said its Honours Unit will be assessing whether using AI for the task is worthwhile after "substantively" using it.
The citations are short summaries combining the honouree's nomination and letters of support which are later published if the application is successful.
Once drafted by AI, they would then be checked by a staff member before being sent to the honours recipient for proofing before publication.
Unsuccessful nominations are not published.
An exemption form released under the Official Information Act and signed off by the Cabinet secretary in July gives DPMC permission to an AI tool called Paerata.
Secured within the department's Microsoft's Azure cloud environment, Paerata was developed for internal government use by the Treasury and its Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS) group, and rolled out for use by government departments in May 2024.
The exemption was needed because the use of personal information by AI is usually restricted by government policy.
"Currently, citations are drafted by the Honours Unit from scratch. However, they are an ideal use case for our Gen-AI tool, Paerata," the application form says.
"It can synthesise information and present concise summaries, saving time for staff, while ensuring that personal information is kept confidential and therefore maintaining public trust and confidence in the honours system."
The form says the personal information includes details that might be found on a CV, like past employment, political involvements, religious and community work, as well as contact information for the nominee, nominator, supporters, and some health information.
Paerata does not learn from the information provided to it, and will not retain the personal information which would all be stored in a "secure honours database with access limited to certain authorised personnel, except as detailed below".
It also cannot share it outside of the department.
"Only the Paerata user will input the original nomination and support letters and receive back the draft citation. This draft citation will then be saved to the Cabinet Office instance of iManage as usual for checking and further steps."
The honours list this year named seven new Knights and Dames, including glaucoma specialist Helen Danesh-Meyer, the chair of the abuse in care Royal Commission Coral Shaw, Xero founder Rod Drury, and motorsport hall-of-famer Scott Dixon, and about 170 other New Zealanders.
In a statement, DPMC said AI was not used to write citations for the 2026 New Year's Honour's list "as these citations were largely written before internal approval was given to use Gen-AI for this purpose".
"After it has substantively used Gen-AI for drafting honours citations, the Honours Unit will assess whether this use is worthwhile."
An assessment rates the privacy impact of using Paerata for drafting honours as "low", with risk of harm "negligible".
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