A nice zinger from the Washington Post today: “AI is spreading through Congress faster than the rules governing its use.”
The article the zinger opens, which covers AI use among Congressional staffers, explains there are no clear guidelines for Congress’s use of AI. A set of rules exists, but according to interviews with staffers, most don’t know about it. And there are no examples of any enforcement efforts:
The few House and Senate rules that exist are poorly understood and seldom enforced. In practice, AI use is left up to the hundreds of individual congressional offices to settle for themselves. It’s not clear how many offices have internal written policies on AI.
Meanwhile, staffers are using AI for research, to help draft legislation, come up with questions for hearings, find reporter contacts, and respond to constituents.
What’s officially prohibited? As reported by the Post:
putting sensitive material such as constituent information into a chatbot, generating deepfakes, making personnel decisions and finalizing legislation.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I can see a clear use case for embracing AI tools in Congressional staffing offices. It could help speed up the lengthy process of drafting and proposing legislation, allowing change to happen more quickly. The Congressional body as a whole acts as a decent check on legislation quality, and could probably spot and correct any LLM-induced issues.
That said, if AI is wholeheartedly embraced from the get-go with no widely-known guidelines, there could be issues with where to draw boundaries. I hope we never live in a world where calling your reps means talking to an AI impersonating a staffer, or worse, an AI impersonating your actual rep! Despite any charitable interpretation of this world — perhaps the synthetic rep could hear more constituent concerns! — I would guess it would still feel antagonistic to the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” spirit of democracy, adding a non-human barrier between human constituents and the people supposed to represent them. Not having a standardized set of guidelines could also put some Congressional offices behind others, similar to issues with AI use in campaign ads.
So I broadly support more formalized guidelines on Congressional AI use. But first, government should focus its efforts on some much-needed federal and international regulation.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.