City lawmakers in Brazil have passed what is believed to be the country’s first law written entirely by artificial intelligence – although they didn’t know it at the time.
The experimental ordinance was passed in the southern city of Porto Alegre in October, and city councilor Ramiro Rosário revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy.
Rosário told The Associated Press that he had asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to draft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water meters when they are stolen. He then presented it to his 35 colleagues on the council, without making a single change or even telling them of its unprecedented origins.
“Had I revealed it beforehand, I’m sure it wouldn’t have even been put to a vote,” Rosário told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously, and the ordinance went into effect on 23 November.
“It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved just because it was written by artificial intelligence,” he added.
ChatGPT’s launch just over a year ago has sparked a global debate about the implications of potentially revolutionary AI-powered chatbots. While some see it as a promising tool, it has also raised concerns and fears about the unintended or undesired effects of a machine taking over tasks currently performed by humans.
Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.3 million, is the second largest city in southern Brazil. The city’s council president, Hamilton Sossmeier, found out that Rosário had enlisted ChatGPT to write the proposal when the councilman bragged about the achievement on social media on Wednesday. Sossmeier initially told local media that he thought it was a “dangerous precedent”.
The AI large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT work by repeatedly trying to guess the next word in a sentence and are prone to making up false information, a phenomenon sometimes called hallucination.
All chatbots sometimes introduce false information when summarising a document, ranging from about 3% of the time for the most advanced GPT model to a rate of about 27% for one of Google’s models, according to recently published research by technology company Vectara.
In an article published earlier this year on the website of Harvard Law School’s Center of Legal Profession, Andrew Perlman, Dean of Suffolk University Law School, wrote that ChatGPT “may herald an even more momentous change than the advent of the Internet”, but also warned of its potential shortcomings.
“It may not always be able to account for the nuances and complexities of the law. As ChatGPT is a machine learning system, it may not have the same level of understanding and judgement as a human lawyer when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedents. This could cause problems in situations where more in-depth legal analysis is required,” Perlman wrote.
Porto Alegre’s Rosário wasn’t the first lawmaker in the world to test ChatGPT’s capabilities. Others have done so on a more limited scale or with less success.
In Massachusetts, Democratic State Senator Barry Finegold turned to ChatGPT to help draft a bill aimed at regulating artificial intelligence models, including ChatGPT. The bill was introduced earlier this year and has yet to be voted on.
Finegold said by phone on Wednesday that ChatGPT can help with some of the more tedious elements of the legislative process, including correctly and quickly finding and citing laws already on the books. But it is vital that everyone knows that ChatGPT or a similar tool has been used in the process, he added.
“We would like to see a watermark on work generated by ChatGPT,” he said, adding that the use of artificial intelligence to help draft new laws was inevitable. “I’m in favour of people using ChatGPT to write laws, as long as it’s clear.”
There was no such transparency for Rosário’s proposal in Porto Alegre. Sossmeier said Rosário did not inform his fellow councillors that ChatGPT had written the proposal.
Keeping the origin of the proposal secret was deliberate. Rosário told the AP that his goal was not only to solve a local problem, but also to spark a debate. He said he typed a 49-word prompt into ChatGPT and it returned the full draft proposal, including justifications, within seconds.
“I am convinced that … humanity is about to experience a new technological revolution,” he said. “All the tools we have developed as a civilisation can be used for evil and for good. That’s why we have to show how they can be used for good”.
And the Council President, who initially condemned the method, appears to have been swayed.
“I changed my mind,” said Sossmeier. “I started to read more and saw that, unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend.”