Brazilian City Enacts an Ordinance That Was Secretly Written By ChatGPT 41
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: 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. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosario revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy. Rosario 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.
"If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn't even have been taken to a vote," Rosario told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23. "It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence," he added. [...] Keeping the proposal's origin secret was intentional. Rosario told the AP his objective was not just to resolve a local issue, but 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.
"I am convinced that ... humanity will experience a new technological revolution," he said. "All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good. That's why we have to show how it can be used for good." And the council president [Hamilton Sossmeier], 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."
"If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn't even have been taken to a vote," Rosario told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23. "It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence," he added. [...] Keeping the proposal's origin secret was intentional. Rosario told the AP his objective was not just to resolve a local issue, but 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.
"I am convinced that ... humanity will experience a new technological revolution," he said. "All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good. That's why we have to show how it can be used for good." And the council president [Hamilton Sossmeier], 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."
if you can't be bothered to write it (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why would anyone bother reading it? I swear these glorified Markov-chain text generators are not a good basis for your art, culture, and government. Future generations are going to pick through our ashes and look on this like we look at the Romans drinking leaded wine.
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Lead poisoning is a longstanding academic debate as to the cause of the decline of the Roman empire. I suspect it's more of an urban legend than strictly a cause of the decline, but the concept should be pretty familiar to laypeople born in the 20th and 21st century.
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OTOH we KNOW that IQs went up and crime rates went down after we stopped putting lead in gasoline.
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Old pipes are OK. They form an oxide layer that saves you.
Cooking in lead pots, drinking from lead cups, eating off lead plates? Not so much.
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The LLMs like chatGPT are quite different from previous generation Markov models. They're quite capable of creating stuff like laws where it's basically just boilerplate text or expanding on ideas.
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Don't worry, we can just ask ChatGPT to summarize it and tell us what it says.
Simple Use Case for ChatGPT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not necessarily object to. This may be a perfectly good measure. But it sounds as if he skimped on quality control, and that's a very necessary step. Sometimes you can skip it, but you never know when.
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If he read the output and made minor changes or no changes at all, I see no problem, so long as he read the output before submitting this for a vote. Would it be any different if his staff wrote it or the lobbyists?
Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people (Score:5, Insightful)
and presumably the people voting read it, right?
The source is irrelevant, the contents are what matter.
Re:Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people (Score:4, Insightful)
"and presumably the people voting read it, right?"
I like you. You're an optimist.
Re:Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people (Score:5, Funny)
While none of the people voting read it, they did paste it into ChatGPT and asked "Can you sum this up in 50 words or less?"
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And what, got the original prompt back?
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Sorry, but this argument fails. Your description of the process is mostly correct. But, the whole legislation is available. Legislative history can be very thin. Some laws are passed with practically no debate (whether or not AI is involved). All legislation SHOULD be reviewed and debated prior to vote, but . . . Congress people and their staffs SHOULD read and verify all bills, but . . .
XaXXon is basically correct.
Re: Nothing wrong as long as reviewed by people (Score:2)
The LLM didn't invent it, it was directed to write up an idea. It's likely that the 49 word prompt adequately described the idea, but it just wouldn't be "proper" to have such a short, straightforward ordinance. So the LLM can "verbosify" the idea to be consistent with what legal documents are supposed to be.
The crazy part is not that an LLM could extend the concept to this extent, the real crazy thing is we can't bring ourselves to just deal with the 50 word version through and through.
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It's probably better than a lot of ordinances written by people.
This is the problem (Score:2)
Why can't the law/ordinance just say "The city can't charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen." In Portuguese of course. Why does it have to be any more complicated than that, sans an identifier number or something?
This is the problem with our legislative systems.
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The problem with our legislative system is that everyone and their mother will do everything they can to work the system to favor only themselves.
So now you have to rigorously define what "stolen" means.
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The problem with our legislative system is that everyone and their mother will do everything they can to work the system to favor only themselves.
So now you have to rigorously define what "stolen" means.
I would counter that if the "short version" of the language isn't clear enough, it isn't a good law in the first place.
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Well, most of the code I write would be much much shorter if I just never added error checking, bounds checking, fallback code, graceful degradation, unit tests, corner-case handling, and a host of other things which separate a good reliable program from an error-ridden piece of garbage.
Laws are the same way. We'd all love short trivial laws, but experience has shown that short trivial laws have loopholes and special cases that unscrupulous people use for ill effect. And it turns out that there are a lot
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My guess is that the city councillor picked this topic specifically because this is such a simple case that it could be drafted by ChatGPT and submitted without a single modification. The only way to understand his comment "without modification" is that he's trying to make a point, make himself famous in the news for being the first in having it fully done by AI, so he picked a simple case.
In my news there are guesses at which of our national politicians use generative AI to partly or fully write proposals
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Re: This is the problem (Score:2)
Perhaps there's a point there, but I'm skeptical the LLM extended form of the brief idea would add meaningful guards rather than empty verbosity.
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What I've found is that when the model can produce workable code, I would be better off pulling in a maintained library to do the same. If GPT can write it, then it's almost certainly already a library.
If there isn't a lot of existing code to do *precisely* what you ask, then it will spit out.. something that may hit a couple pieces of the problem that would be part of a computer programming class, but then useless mistakes otherwise.
If there is existing code to do precisely what you ask... well why isn't
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Why can't the law/ordinance just say "The city can't charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen." In Portuguese of course. Why does it have to be any more complicated than that, sans an identifier number or something?
This is the problem with our legislative systems.
I just draped a woman’s scarf over mine and haven’t paid a thing. Water utilities hate this one weird trick!
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords (Score:2)
Are they going to return their paycheck? (Score:2)
I mean when lawmakers are flat out admitting they aren't doing the job they are paid to do and instead just offloaded it to a computer, why should they get paid?
\o/ (Score:1)
Make the most of your opportunity, in the future, objections too will be raised by AI.
Might actually be clear and concise (Score:2)
A human can always be trusted to write something that will be misunderstood or vague so as to ensure future abuse.
AI might actually write something that's clear and legally air-tight.
Great idea (Score:1)
Would be okay if based on logical reasoner (Score:2)
Actually being able to have ALL law codified in a way that computers can understand and generate it would be pretty useful. Or, have a computer smart enough to figure it out, and give access to ALL the laws and regulations to it. However this is a law created by a bullshit generator. He wasn't using a logical reasoner. Just yesterday I was beating my head against a configuration thing and asked Claude.ai which gave me an incredibly useful response which unfortunately was based on the existence of a NON-EXIS
Take it to yer grave (Score:2)
seems to me you'd get a better dramatic payoff if you told no one but saved evidence to be revealed on your death. Then it might be notable and interesting. A gamble with more stakes, IMO. But does anyone think like that anymore? Humanity bores me I think.
Tesing whether Slashdot is down. (Score:2)
Tesing 123
The objections would come from (Score:1)
The objections would come from those who want to retain power and control, as opposed to those politicians that are in service to their constituents, and want to do the best for them, as opposed to the objections who want to do the best for themselves.