The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has begun to use AI tools for a number of purposes, a Government minister has told Parliament.
Andrew Gwynne, a minister in the Department for Health and Social Care, provided the information last week, shortly before he was sacked from the role and suspended from the Labour Party for his role in the controversy over a WhatsApp group.
In response to a question from Conservative MP Sir John Hayes, he referred to a pilot project to streamline inspections of meat businesses through using generative AI to collate notes. This is aimed at providing more uniform reporting and improving data quality in comparison with the existing method of paper based observations.
Another generative AI project is aimed at improving data quality.
“As most data from national and international food alert systems is unstructured text, considerable human effort has been required to extract the relevant information and then categorise it to a standardised format,” Gwynne said.
“The aim is to reduce the manual work required in improving data quality, which will allow colleagues to spend more time deriving insights from data rather than cleaning data, while also improving the speediness of the response.
Detecting food risk
He also highlighted the FSA’s use of “traditional AI” in pattern detection in identifying food risk. The technology can extract and structure information from documents including shipping manifests and web pages.
“We aim to see food safety and authenticity risks before the food lands on the United Kingdom’s shores,” Gwynne said.
