Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s think tank had a dramatic conclusion this month: AI could replace a fifth of the work done by public servants. If applied to Australia, the finding would result in tens of billions of dollars in annual savings.

The research from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change used a seemingly ingenious method. Despite admitting that AI models can be “a mysterious ‘black box’ that may or may not give reliable results”, the researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to determine which public service tasks could be replaced by AI and how that could be done.