This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The two research teams have developed and used AI detectors trained on thousands of political motions in Sweden and the UK. What surprised the researchers was not that politicians were using AI—but that not a single one disclosed this openly.
"Regardless of the extent to which AI has been used, there may be risks associated with a lack of transparency. We also note that texts produced with the help of AI are often very well-written and persuasive, which increases the risk that errors will not even be spotted by the writers themselves. "Furthermore, it is a matter of trust from the recipient's perspective," says Minerva Suvanto, the report's lead author and a Ph.D. student in the Division of Vehicle Engineering and Autonomous Systems at the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
She refers, for example, to the SOM Institute's report "Swedish AI Opinion 2023–2025," which examines the public's views on AI in various contexts. Among other things, it shows that, overall, 88% of Swedes are quite or very concerned that "false information generated by AI may influence democratic elections." The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server. As the use of AI has become so widespread in society, it has recently become common practice to label texts or images produced with the aid of AI, including in the media.
However, until very recently, there were no binding rules requiring such disclosure in Sweden. On Aug. 2, 2026, however, the European Commission's new transparency rules came into force. The AI Regulation sets out how and when, for example, companies and public sector bodies must label their content to indicate whether AI has been used and, if so, to what extent.
"In our research, we have focused neither on regulatory frameworks nor on factual content, but have kept strictly to the language itself. However, it will be interesting to see how the new rules will be applied in Sweden and whether this will affect the drafting of parliamentary motions in the future. Although the AI Regulation is rather vague, and there are exemptions if AI is used solely for editing, politicians may reassess how they report their use of AI—given that they want to maintain voters' trust," says Suvanto.
To determine whether AI had been used to any extent in parliamentary motions, the researchers created custom AI detectors—one for Swedish texts and one for English. They began by analyzing 1,400 Swedish and 1,400 British motions written between 2014 and 2020—a period before established chatbots existed and when all motions were written by humans. To generate equivalent texts using AI, they first had a chatbot summarize each original text and, based on that summary, write a new text of its own.
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