Submission Assistant FAQ
Below are some of the common questions we get about our Submission Assistant. We’ll be adding to this list going forward as needed.
1) How are you using AI to assist with your campaign?
We created an Assistant that uses generative AI to help regular Australians get started on their submission during the currently open feedback period for the Australian Government’s draft Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2023.
Our Assistant allows the requestor to select what their biggest concerns with the Bill are, and provides them with an initial draft template on which they can base their own personal submission to the draft bill on.
The majority of the public have never drafted or needed to prepare a submission to a proposed Bill. We hypothesised that for some, if not many, the idea of preparing a submission would be quite daunting. How does one write these types of documents? How does one start the document? End it? We thought that the uncertainty that surrounds how a submission might be worded or presented could form an exclusionary barrier of entry into the political discussion, which we are aiming to lower.
There are many who, for whatever reason, might not feel confident in their writing ability and others who suffer from dyslexia and other challenges in arranging their thoughts using a keyboard. Many of these Australians might nonetheless have valid concerns about the Bill and we believe it is important for their voice to be heard.
In other cases, regular Australians are time poor (especially at the moment with the cost of living) and some may not have the skills, knowledge, or experience drafting submissions like those being requested by the Government.
Evidence of this can be seen for example with the sessions that Digital Rights Watch and Electronic Frontiers Australia occasionally run offering guidance on how to write submissions. In some cases, Australians simply don’t know how to get started voicing their concerns, which is extremely damaging for democracy.
Our hope was that by providing a Submission Assistant and a first draft based on a list of common concerns, the process of proof-reading and adjusting the draft (as our website recommends) might be more manageable for those who would otherwise find it difficult to write a Submission from scratch and that they could therefore be included within this important democratic process, where they otherwise might not.
2) Do you have any concerns about using AI to write these submissions (rather than encouraging people to write their own submission) could be seen as less authentic?
We don’t see those things as mutually exclusive. We’re already encouraging people to write their own submissions without assistance from our tool and have been doing so since the Bill was first released. We feel completely from-scratch submissions are still the preferred method where possible.
Even using our tool, the user is still choosing the concerns that want to convey to the Government about the Bill.
The original due date for feedback being the 4th of August (a little over a month from when the draft bill was released) made the onus on regular Australians to learn this process, and write their own submission from scratch even more burdensome. The extension of the submission period to the 20th August did not significantly lessen that burden.
Given how much previously face-to-face discussion has moved online, we feel as many Australians as possible deserve to have their voice heard on a Bill this sweeping and this concerning, regarding their freedom of expression.
We were considering creating a petition, or giving people a standard form letter to submit. However, we felt those options were even less personal. Our Assistant lets people customise the template to suit the things in the Bill that they are most concerned about, making it much more personal and authentic. We also feel that petitions and form letters are too easily ignored by lawmakers – simply reading one and throwing the rest in the trash can.
Our website recommends the following, which is clearly stated at the top of the Submission Assistant page:
5) Proof-read the document and adjust it so that it’s in your own words.
https://assistant.StopAussieCensorship.org
6) Once you’re happy, submit your feedback to the government website.
If a user of the AI Assistant is satisfied that the AI generated document, based on their choices, sufficiently addresses their concerns, they might choose to submit it as is.
We hope submissions that have used AI will not be viewed as less authentic than those that do not. To believe that a submission that has been generated using AI in part or in whole as less authentic, without understanding the individual circumstances of the submitter, appears to us to be a little presumptuous.
3) What’s the response been to your campaign so far?
We’ve had a number of people reach out to us to thank us for creating the digital assistant. Some have mentioned how it made the process of preparing a submission easier. As of 9th August 2023 we have had over 100 uses of the assistant to create draft submissions. We do not have (access to) data on how many of these draft submissions have been used to create submissions that have been lodged.