I know this is a little geeky but I like someone who reaches out to me this way. I’m pleased to see Andrew Burnham writing this himself (I assume it is himself who’s taken a few minutes to write this)
Thanks to Steve Gothard for sending me (and others) this post. Of course we can agree with our money being put this way.
Around the corner from my flat in the City of London there is a tent city running behind a concrete wall but a few yards away Lower Thames Street.
I am happy for my tax-money to be organised by Government to do this work and reduce the strain on Crisis at Christmas.
Could AI have written it?
Certainly. An LLM given something like:
“Write a warm, optimistic LinkedIn post in Andy Burnham’s voice announcing a £442m programme to end rough sleeping, incorporating his experience selling the Big Issue, deindustrialisation, Covid solidarity, localism and a call for society to pull together.”
could produce something extremely close to this.
But that’s different from evidence that an LLM actually did write it.
There are also signs pointing towards conventional political speechwriting. The prose has the characteristics of a competent political communications team:
carefully selected anecdote;
controlled repetition;
short paragraphs for social media;
emotional escalation;
three-part lists;
slogans embedded in apparently spontaneous prose;
policy announcement placed after the emotional groundwork;
deliberately non-technical language.
Indeed, the strongest alternative to “AI-generated” is not “authentically spontaneous Burnham.” It’s “human political speechwriter/editor.”
Call me cynical, a word I first learned in the mid-1960s from a secondary school English teacher who called me that. I had to look the word up, in a dictionary.