Amid urgent calls to fill the vacuum of much-needed AI regulation, it can sometimes feel easy to forget that many regulations really suck. Federal and state bureaucracies are full of calcified rules dating back to McCarthy and fax machines, some of them declared unconstitutional decades ago but still on the books. It would take a lifetime to sort through them all.
At least, that was the case until recently. If there’s one thing modern AI is good at, it’s quickly parsing vast quantities of text.
On Wednesday, the New York Times writes, New York governor Kathy Hochul directed the state to use AI to help excise decades of bureaucratic cruft.
My feelings on this decision are mixed. I feel strongly that many kinds of regulation do more harm than good, and ever since my days as an ExxonMobil engineer, I’ve had a soft spot for cleaning up confusing and pointlessly costly requirements. But finding potentially bad laws isn’t the same as removing the right ones. With the seemingly accidental interruption of popular and life-saving programs like PEPFAR last year, we’ve already seen AI-supported cleanup efforts cause major harm.
Nor do I quite buy Governor Hochul’s attempts to tell New York citizens that “their government [is] there for them,” after she caved to industry pressure and demanded the watering-down of state AI regulation against the will of New York’s own legislature.
Still, I’m tentatively excited to see AI go to work on such a well-matched task, helping overworked state officials clear out a decades-long backlog of accumulated legislative grime.
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.