Those who rely on artificial intelligence to summarize official material may get a misleadingly narrow or incomplete version of it, a senior designer for the UK government has warned.

The country's Department for Education's digital services are seeing more traffic from AI-mediated search and fewer actual page visits, according to head of design Mark Edwards. "At first, this felt like progress; faster access to information is not something to resist," he writes in a blogpost on the GOV.UK website. "But as we looked closer, a more complicated picture emerged."

If AI-mediated agents or answers become the dominant entry point, we need to be sure that people who lack confidence or familiarity are not disadvantaged further...

One problem is that AI tools only answer the question they are asked: "They meet users where they already are, which can limit discovery and reinforce gaps in understanding," Edwards writes. For example, a teenager leaving school may not know to search specifically for information on options such as apprenticeships, T-levels or vocational pathways.

Things may not be as bad for a clueless school-leaver as Edwards fears. An AI overview generated by Google in response to a search on the question "What are my options leaving school?" from a UK IP address included all three of the options he mentioned as well as A-levels, university and getting a job. It drew on sources including a GOV.UK blogpost designed to answer this question, as well as graduate careers sites and advice pages on websites run by charities, a local authority and an individual school, all of which appeared fairly reliable.

But even if AI tools can provide detailed answers to broad questions, those writing official websites will need to do so in future partly for people who never visit.

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"We now need to design with the expectation that much of what we publish will be read indirectly, atomised, summarised or reinterpreted by systems we don't control," writes Edwards.

This makes qualities including clear, well-structured content in plain English even more important, but also means thinking about whether a paragraph lifted out of context is safe and accurate. Edwards adds that is also likely to mean testing what material looks like after it has gone through AI tools and designing it to be interpreted by both machines and people. "If AI-mediated agents or answers become the dominant entry point, we need to be sure that people who lack confidence or familiarity are not disadvantaged further," he says.

The Government Digital Service is piloting its own AI-driven chatbot, which only uses material from GOV.UK, and reckons this is now accurate in 90 percent of its answers. Users find its 10.7 second average response time is too slow, however, so the service is considering breaking up answers to provide an initial reply more quickly. ®

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