‘I use AI’ says Cork Mayor after speech was generated by data firm

The Lord Mayor of Cork has admitted he is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to write his speeches.

Fergal Dennehy made the admission after giving a speech at a Cork data firm which was entirely generated by the company itself.

“In the past, I would have spent hours and hours writing, but my job is to represent the people of Cork, and I want to do my very best at doing that,” he said, after being asked if it was a “slippery slope” to be using the technology for speeches.

He also claimed other members of Cork City Council are using apps such as ChatGPT for council business.

“You can tell nowadays with the questions coming into the council and the motions being tabled, they all have the same subsections and formats that let you know it’s ChatGPT,” he said.

The Lord Mayor added that it was about “getting the balance right”.

“If I put something into ChatGPT and I’m not comfortable with it, I will change it,” he said.

But from a time and efficiency perspective, it is wonderful, he continued. 

“You can do something now in seconds that before would have taken hours.”

Mr Dennehy said that while he believes a hybrid model of AI and human effort is the best way to go, ChatGPT can often think what he is thinking.

“It can be very accurate. But I hate looking at anything that has been written by ChatGPT. It takes the personality out of it, and I personally don’t like that. Everything I do has my touch on it.”

Mr Dennehy was speaking after delivering the speech at the headquarters of cloud platform CloudCIX in Hollyhill yesterday. The speech had been given to him by the founder of CloudCIX, Jerry Sweeney.

In the speech, Mr Dennehy called CloudCIX a cornerstone of Cork’s digital infrastructure, providing “world-class data centre services to over 150 organisations across the public and private sectors”.

The speech went on to recognise “the 20 dedicated staff at CloudCIX,” adding that “behind every great innovation was a team of passionate, hardworking individuals — and today’s achievement is a testament to your skill, dedication, and vision”.

Mr Sweeney told The Echo: “I gave the chatbot the facts. It reads my boring stuff, and you can see how exciting the AI made it. Wherever the [Lord] Mayor goes, he will ask for input on a speech because he wants to be informed.”