The government plans to employ generative AI in drafting citations for the next New Year’s Honours.
These citations offer brief summaries that blend the honouree’s nomination with supporting letters, and they get published upon successful application.
After AI drafting, a staff member reviews the citations before sending them to the honours recipient for proofreading prior to publication.
Nominations that fail do not get published.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) said that its Honours Unit will evaluate the value of using AI for this task after employing it “substantively.”
An Official Information Act-released exemption form, signed by the Cabinet secretary in July, authorises DPMC to use an AI tool named Paerata.
Paerata, developed by the Treasury and its Central Agencies Shared Services (CASS) group for internal government use, rolled out to government departments in May 2024.
The exemption proved necessary since government policy typically restricts AI’s use of personal information.
“Currently, citations are drafted by the Honours Unit from scratch. However, they are an ideal use case for our Gen-AI tool, Paerata,” the application form said.
“It can synthesise information and present concise summaries, saving time for staff, while ensuring that personal information is kept confidential and therefore maintaining public trust and confidence in the honours system.”
The form specifies that personal information encompasses CV-like details, such as past employment, political involvement, and religious and community work, plus contact details for nominees, nominators, and supporters, along with some health data.
Paerata neither learns from provided information nor retains personal data, which remains stored in a secure honours database accessible only to authorised personnel.
It also cannot share the information outside the department.
“Only the Paerata user will input the original nomination and support letters and receive back the draft citation. This draft citation will then be saved to the Cabinet Office instance of iManage as usual for checking and further steps.”
DPMC confirmed AI was not used for the 2026 New Year’s Honours citations, “as these citations were largely written before internal approval was given to use Gen-AI for this purpose.”
“After it has substantively used Gen-AI for drafting honours citations, the Honours Unit will assess whether this use is worthwhile.”