ROME, June 1 (Reuters) - An Italian senator has surprised his colleagues by reading out in parliament a speech drafted by a chatbot, saying afterwards that he pulled the stunt to stir "a serious debate" on risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence. "How many of us today are able to distinguish between a text produced by human intelligence and a stream of thoughts ... produced by an artificial intelligence algorithm?" His speech, on the subject of various bilateral deals with Switzerland, was produced by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O)-backed OpenAI's GPT-4 chatbot, the senator told Reuters on Thursday. He said his staff "took a couple of hours" to feed the necessary information into the software, which then produced the speech "instantaneously". Reporting by Federico Maccioni; Editing by Alvise Armellini and David HolmesOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Persons: Marco Lombardo, Lombardo's, Carlo Calenda, " Lombardo, Margrethe Vestager, Federico Maccioni, Alvise Armellini, David Holmes Organizations: Microsoft Corp, Reuters, Twitter, European Union, Thomson Locations: Italian, Switzerland, Italy