Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

The Republic of Ireland's new AI minister should probably consult ChatGPT immediately to ask for pointers on how to do her job.

Niamh Smyth was appointed junior minister at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment last week with a brief encompassing trade promotion, digital transformation, and AI.

However, according to the Irish Independent, she admits that she's "never used ChatGPT and doesn't have DeepSeek downloaded on her phone, even though hundreds of millions of people have installed the new Chinese app on devices across the western world."

We're sure the wisdom of their decision to install DeepSeek will be the subject of much debate as the year progresses. Still, although the politician's chat logs are safe from being spilled by malicious folk or, erm, perused by Beijing, Smyth is candid about her lack of experience with the technology.

"It's all a new learning curve, but I will learn fast and apply myself to the new role," she said, perhaps relievedly for the people of Ireland.

Her concerns at this point seem limited to how "AI is now increasingly a problem with homework in secondary schools" and "she joked that she hoped her eight-year-old daughter, Juliet, is not using AI to do her homework."

In this household, our eight-year-old is struggling with the eight times table, so we don't see how his current intellectual capacity will extend to asking an AI for help when we can't even explain it in a way he understands.

Thus, Smyth doesn't seem to know the worst of it yet. "I have met with the secretary general of the department to discuss my new role," she said. "We discussed the importance of supporting businesses and providing education around the benefits of artificial intelligence to create efficiencies to demystify the use of AI."

However, Smyth added that she feels she knows "as much as any colleague" about AI in the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), which is likely true. Across the Irish Sea, the Health Secretary in the British government has never been a doctor, though they are expected to make decisions affecting state healthcare.

In fact, across the world, governments are mainly made up of dilettantes who must suddenly appear to know how to handle their given brief. In 2018, The Register reported how, after being named Japan's deputy minister responsible for cybersecurity, Yoshitaka Sakurada revealed he had never used a computer and did not know how to use one.

In 2017, then British Home Secretary Amber Rudd emphasized the need to get people who "understand the necessary hashtags" talking. Of course, the Home Office later clarified that she had meant "image hashing, the process of detecting the recurrence of an image or video online."

In more worryingly contemporary times, the US's new federal chief information officer has no prior experience as a CIO but is now tasked with overseeing IT operations and strategy for the entire federal government.

And what business does Elon Musk have not just running a Department of Government Efficiency but also gaining access to the US Treasury payment system and letting essentially a bunch of kids loose on it? Answers on a postcard, please.

Good luck, everyone. We're going to need it. ®