11.30.2023
City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the
nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence
(AI) — even if they didn’t know it at the time.
The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern
city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed
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 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.
He then presented it to his 35 peers on the council without making
a single change or even letting them know about its
unprecedented origin. The 36-member council approved it
unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23.
The arrival of ChatGPT on the marketplace just a year ago has
sparked a global debate on the impacts of potentially
revolutionary AI-powered chatbots. 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.
Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.3 million, is the second-largest
city in Brazil’s south. 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. Sossmeier initially told local media
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
summarizing 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 the
tech company Vectara.
In an article published on the website of Harvard Law School’s
Center of Legal Profession earlier this year, Andrew Perlman,
wrote that ChatGPT “is a machine learning system, it may not have
the same level of understanding and judgment as a human lawyer
when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedent. This
could lead to problems in situations where a more in-depth legal
analysis is required”.
There was no such transparency for Rosário’s proposal in Porto
Alegre. Sossmeier said Rosário did not inform fellow council
members that ChatGPT had written the proposal.
Rosário told the AP his objective was also to spark a debate. He
said he entered a 49-word prompt into ChatGPT and it returned
the full draft proposal within seconds, including justifications.
And the council president, who initially decried the method,
already appears to have been swayed. “I changed my mind,”
Sossmeier said. “I started to read more in depth and saw that,
unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend.”
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