Alice said her sister was definitely her role model when it came to any speech making.
"I learnt about the Lions competition from her and she gave me some good tips for it."
However, her sister had not been not allowed to come to the event because it would be too off-putting during her performance she said.
"Sadly, we can’t actually look at each other when we’re doing our speeches because we actually put each other off a bit.
"I think it’s because we’re quite close as well."
Alice said her and her sister’s skills came from their mother, who was never afraid to speak her mind.
She also did speech and drama as co-curricular activities, Alice said.
"Growing up doing lots of drama has exposed me to being OK when people don’t like your performance and knowing not to stutter and little things like that."
Her speech was about the impact chatbot and virtual assistant ChatGPT was going to have on society’s future.
"I ended my speech asking the question whether my speech was written by AI and if that mattered or not."
She said she had a poem in her speech written by ChatGPT about what ChatGPT could do in the future.
She asked the audience whether they considered using the chatbot cheating.
For the competition, Alice had to perform a minute-long impromptu speech about whether cats or dogs were better as pets.
She had both a cat and a dog as pets and argued cats were better because they were more intelligent and required less maintenance, Alice said.
She would be going to the national competition in Wainuiomata in August.
Next year she was planning on studying primary school teaching at the University of Otago.
