Switzerland, together with Diplo Foundation, has developed a pilot project to use artificial intelligence to make UN Security Council meetings more accessible. As of today, AI-powered reports – including a chatbot – on ten selected meetings are online. This includes the open debate on women, peace and security on October 24.
Image generated by artificial intelligence using the following prompt: "Show a photorealistic robot sitting at the Security Council horseshoe table in the Security Council chamber. The robot is taking notes during a meeting.”
In 2023 alone, the UN Security Council (UNSC) met for approximately 600 hours. There is a wealth of information contained in its meetings, but it is difficult to make use of it: While public meetings are streamed live on UN Web TV, it can take several weeks for official UN meeting records to be released. The transcripts are also delivered in long PDF files, making content analysis time-consuming.
Artificial intelligence has great potential to unlock UNSC meetings as a source of information, especially for actors with limited resources. For this reason, Switzerland has partnered with Diplo Foundation, a non-profit organization (NPO) established by Switzerland and Malta, to train its AI solution, DiploGTP, on UNSC meetings and issues. This project is in line with Switzerland's priority as an elected member to enhance the Council's effectiveness – and with its longstanding efforts for a transparent Council, which go well beyond the current mandate.
AI-powered reports on 10 selected UNSC meetings
The scope of the pilot project was limited to ten UNSC meetings. Eligible meetings were signature events of the rotating presidencies of the UNSC that discussed, implicitly or explicitly, aspects from A New Agenda for Peace.
Each of the ten reports contains a Q&A based on “A New Agenda for Peace”, a knowledge graph, a report per speaker, a report by key themes, and an automated transcript of the livestreamed meeting. In addition, there is an overall report sourcing content from all ten debates. This overall report includes a chatbot, a Q&A, and statistics on speech length and more.
AI solution “DiploGPT”
The AI solution used in the project is called DiploGPT and is developed by Diplo Foundation. DiploGPT combines state-of-the-art speech-to-text, information retrieval, and text generation, – both proprietary and open-sourced – to create specialized tools for diplomatic use cases.
While DiploGPT has already been used to report on several hundred multilateral meetings, it is largely specialized on topics from cyber and tech diplomacy. The UN Security Council is relatively new terrain for the tool. For this reason, Switzerland and Diplo Foundation worked together to train DiploGPT. The training material included the official transcripts of roughly 20 UNSC meetings as well as the New Agenda for Peace, which served as the framework for the AI-powered reporting.
