The list of questions, accidentally sent to National’s Minister for Seniors Casey Costello, soon fell into the hands of 1News.
As part of scrutiny week, Ms Leary prepared a list of questions to put to Ms Costello. However, late on Tuesday night she accidentally forwarded a list of her prepared questions directly to the minister, with what appeared to be ChatGPT prompts included.
When speaking to 1News yesterday, Ms Leary was asked "do you use ChatGPT to generate any of your questions?"
Ms Leary told the reporter she did not "directly use ChatGPT to ask questions".
"I use AI to help me analyse documents. I formulate my own questions."
In the email to Ms Costello from Ms Leary, there were 20 questions and a range of prompts.
The prompts promised that "below are sharper, more specific and more prosecutorial question sets tailored precisely to Ingrid Leary’s style."
They came from her parliamentary email at 11pm on Tuesday.
Another prompt said "these are designed to trap the minister, create clear contrasts and highlight delay [and] resident harm".
1News then showed her the email, and Leary claimed she was "not aware of that email", did not recall sending the email and could not comment.
Ms Leary then said she would "check with her office", and suggested the email could have come from a someone else in her office.
"There are others in my office who have access to my emails, so I’ll need to find out what’s happened."
Ms Leary later told 1News she did, in fact, use ChatGPT and the email did come from her. However, she claimed she was not "the only one".
"These types of things happen."
She was referring to a staff member in National Minister Matt Doocey’s office sending an email including a mental health plan meant for stakeholders to all executive assistants at parliament in error.
In a statement to the ODT late last night, Ms Leary acknowledged her "mistake".
"After a long day of scrutiny hearings I used AI to help analyse some documents and unfortunately sent the results to the wrong address.
"My mistake for sending the email to the wrong address.
"I didn’t use any of the questions or even refer to them in the session with Casey Costello." — Allied Media
