Politician Admits He Used ChatGPT to Generate New Law

He didn't make a single change to what the chatbot spat out — and the law still passed.

Model Legislation

Despite ChatGPT infamously not being able to tell truth from fiction — let alone solve simple math problems — a city in southern Brazil just enacted the country's first legislation entirely written by the chatbot.

As the Associated Press reports, Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to prompting ChatGPT to craft a proposal aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters.

According to the report, he didn't make a single change to what the chatbot spat out — and didn't even tell the council it was AI-generated in the first place.

But that was very much part of his intention, it seems.

"If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote," Rosarío told the AP. "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."

Rage Against the Machine

Porto Alegre's council president Hamilton Sossmeier only found out about Rosarío's scheme after he bragged about the law passing on social media.

Sossmeier called the action a "dangerous precedent" in interviews with local media, per the AP.

We can't help but agree. ChatGPT has repeatedly been shown to have a flawed and tenuous connection to reality. Despite its incredible popularity, it still invents facts with abandon and even comes up with entirely made-up numbers when summarizing data.

Case in point: a lawyer was even caught using the tool to come up with legal briefs after it turned out the cases it was referencing in its output were entirely fabricated.

While Rosarío used ChatGPT without telling the rest of the council, other lawmakers, including in the US, argue there's still a time and place for the tech — but only if it's being used responsibly and transparently.

"We want work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked," Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold, who drafted a bill using the chatbot, told the AP. "I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear."

Meanwhile, Rosarío has no regrets.

"All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good," he told the AP. "That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good."

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