Nicola Willis says Chris Hipkins’ big speech could have been AI - but is AI writing her speeches?

Thursday, 26 February 2026

When Labour leader Chris Hipkins finished his big “state of the nation” address, National’s Nicola Willis lampooned his “platitudes and sentiment”.

She said it was as substantial as “jelly” and reckoned an AI tool could have authored it.

“Truly, Chat GPT could have written that speech, guys. It was a collection of platitudes and focus groups sentiments, and I actually didn't disagree with many of the sentiments,” she told reporters on Monday, following Hipkins’ speech.

The speech included few promises and few solutions.

It focused mostly on outlining issues he cared about and how he viewed the country.

But does that mean it was written by AI?

When Willis said the speech sounded like something Chat GPT could conjure, Stuff decided to see if that claim could be proved.

AI tools such as GPT Zero analyse text to try to work out the likelihood of it being written by a person or another AI. These tools are not 100% accurate.

Stuff asked GPT Zero to read Hipkins’ state of the nation speech. It wasn’t entirely confident the speech was entirely human… but on balance, it believed the speech was written by a real person. It gave it a 79% human score.

Some paragraphs sounded a bit robotic, the tool said.

Ironically, the AI thought that Hipkins talking about AI was likely written by AI. It said:

Productivity has stagnated for years while our international competitors have been pulling ahead of us.Technology is transforming entire industries, yet our investment in innovation and R&D remains stubbornly low. AI is already reshaping how businesses operate and how work gets done.New Zealand needs a plan for that - and it needs to be one we develop together, not something that just happens to us.

– Chris Hipkins, during his state of the nation speech

Asked on Tuesday to respond to Willis’ claim that Chat GPT could have written his speech, Hipkins said: “The fact that Nicola Willis seems to be spending all of her time reading my speeches and monitoring everything that I'm saying, really speaks volumes about where her priorities lie.

“Perhaps, if she spent a bit more time on the job that she has now, being our finance minister, the economy wouldn’t be in the mess that it’s in,” he told Stuff.

Are any ministers using AI for speech writing?

In January, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivered a lengthy “state of the nation” address. GPT Zero said it was confident, “all pages are human-written”.

Earlier this month, ACT leader David Seymour also delivered a lengthy “state of the nation” where he called for a smaller government. Again, GPT Zero was confident that was all human.

Another big speech to start the year was delivered by Willis herself at the NZ Economic Forum in Hamilton.

When GPT Zero analysed her speech, it said: “We are highly confident this text is a mix of AI and human.”

Of the speech’s 197 sentences, it believed 159 of them were AI-generated or AI-assisted.

For the most part, it thought AI was involved because the speech was too grammatically correct - more correct than most normal people would be.

It said sections of the speech were “impersonal” and long. The speech was also “formal and polished”, GPT Zero said, which it believed was a sign of AI use.

It thought this sentence had a “high” likelihood of being AI-generated:

History shows New Zealand’s biggest gains have come from disciplined decisions at home - managing the public finances responsibly, backing investment, staying open to the world, and building institutions that support long-term growth.

– Nicola Willis, at the NZ Economic Forum

GPT Zero said that section used “indirect speech and phrasing” which resulted in “an impersonal tone”.

“It uses complex sentence structures with multiple clauses, conveying detailed information and nuanced arguments, as seen in the use of a subordinate clause,” the AI said.

Later in the speech, another section was also deemed to be very AI. Willis said: “New Zealand’s future will be shaped by whether we back the people who invest, build, and create opportunity, or burden them with uncertainty and cost.”

The AI said: “The phrase ‘invest, build, and create opportunity’ is a common and unoriginal expression, lacking creativity.”

This section was “formal and structured”, as well as “polished” and “clear and logical”, according to the AI review. Those were all, it thought, signs of AI assistance.

Stuff put these computer-generated findings to Willis. She said there were a lot of real people involved in writing her speech and denied it had been written by AI.

“The speech was developed under my direction by office staff using material from MBIE and Treasury, and reflects this Government’s commitment to fiscal prudence and economic growth,” she replied.

However, she conceded that Microsoft Copilot was used to edit the speech. She said that while AI helped with grammar, spelling and phrasing, it didn’t write any of the sentences.

“Microsoft Copilot was used as a tool to check phrasing and grammar, not to write or construct speech content,” she said.

To be fair to the AI that checks for AI, it never said her speech was completely AI-written. It said it had signs of being AI-assisted, which looks to be the case.

Hipkins’, Luxon’s and Seymour’s speeches carried their own grammatical idiosyncrasies. Hipkins’ was littered with one- and two-word sentences.

Luxon’s talk of “maths” (not math) and getting cops “on the beat”, plus his desire to personally “unleash extraordinary potential”, seemed to confuse the AI enough that it didn’t think another AI could’ve written it.

As for Seymour, his occasional stream-of-consciousness speech-writing was deemed very human. AI wouldn’t say: “The good news is, that’s a pretty good description of our actual history. We just need to tell it.”

Regardless, Willis argued her speech was better than Hipkins’. She said it covered more points and had more substance.

But that’s a decision best left to voters, not AI, to decide.