Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister Apologizes After Using Anti-Feminist Quote Made Up by AI

One imagines that Ebba Busch mulled over every word of the press release published Thursday, August 14, on her social media. It's hard to be otherwise when you publicly acknowledge a signed blunder and, implicitly, your incompetence. At the heart of the matter: a quote used in a speech a few weeks earlier by the very conservative Swedish Deputy Prime Minister for Energy and Industry, known for her anti-immigration and pro-Israel stance (she notably asserted that "Israel was doing the whole world a favor" in its war in Gaza). And invented from scratch by an AI.

On June 27, during her party's annual congress, Ebba Busch took to the stage, as she often does, to attack the feminists she detests. In her sights, in particular, "cultural writer Elina Pahnke ," the "angriest of all," who reportedly declared: "The power of men is not an abstraction - it is concrete, and it crushes lives." A scandalous quote for the Swedish politician.

In a text published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet , Elina Pahnke recounts being surprised to hear her name mentioned by the Deputy Prime Minister, discovering the sequence like everyone else while watching television. The problem: the journalist and writer has no memory of ever having written or said this sentence. She checks, searches on the internet, on her own social networks, contacting the Christian Democratic Party of which Ebba Busch is the president. Nothing works: the quote does not exist.

On August 14, Elina Pahnke finally told this story in the columns of Aftonbladet . A few hours later, a statement from the Deputy Prime Minister was released. It begins: "I want to apologize to Elina Pahnke." In these few lines, Ebba Busch admits to having "attributed" a quote from Elina Pahnke that she "did not say."

She explains that the error came from an "artificial intelligence tool" (without naming it) that allegedly mixed together several statements made by Elina Pahnke in the past to invent a quote. The AI even assured Ebba Busch's teams that the sentence came from a tweet and a press article... both of which are, however, untraceable. She does not, however, specify the request she made to this "tool" to find the perfect quote for her anti-feminist speech. "This is a completely new situation for us [...]. We take this seriously and we will work differently in the future," concludes Ebba Busch.

Ironically, in early August, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson explained that he regularly uses Chat-GPT to get a second opinion when making decisions for the country. And that many of his colleagues do the same on a daily basis. They'll probably think twice before using it from now on.