Technology

Do you know who actually wrote any law passed in the past 5 years?

I mean actually know. Who contributed? who understood the legalese? who snuck in something that meant something else when actually enacted?

The answer probably no for almost everybody. Even the people who vote on the laws usually have no idea who actually worked on a bill. They know the sponsors and whoever comes with the petitioner to talk about it. It's not usually full of attributations.

We pay huge bucks to lawyers to read over this stuff and to consider the impact of a bill before actually discussing it in committees before it even gets a vote, typically. If something is missed it's on the elected officials.

This is such a non-news story because the humans read something and chose to go with it. End of story.

Gosh I feel less insane for the email that I sent to my city council asking them to define rules requiring transparency of AI for writing civic codes or just flat out not allow it at all.

edit: Oh, wait. I think that I demanded that AI can't run for seats on the council, as well. I'm standing by that one, too. Be damned, Roko's basilisk!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time.

Rosário told The Associated Press that he asked OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to craft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen.

While some see it as a promising tool, it has also caused concerns and anxiety about the unintended or undesired impacts of a machine handling tasks currently performed by humans.

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.

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.

Finegold said by phone on Wednesday that ChatGPT can help with some of the more tedious elements of the lawmaking process, including correctly and quickly searching and citing laws already on the books.

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AI government is real