Congressional office drowning in lawslop
Congress's legislative proofreaders say AI-generated bills aren't ready for primetime
Just a few days ago, my colleague Alana covered the widespread use of AI in U.S. congressional offices. She speculated that it could speed up the process of drafting legislation, among other things.
Politico’s Owen Dahlkamp confirms this today in an article about conditions inside the Office of the Legislative Counsel (OLC), which provides drafting services to committees and House members. The OLC does important work making legally sound text out of rough proposals and amateur copy. But according to “eight current and former officials who work or have worked in the office,” the deluge of AI-written drafts pouring in from congressional offices and outside groups is full of mistakes and ambiguities. These slow the legislative process and can lead to lawsuits if passed into law.
As a simple example of the kind of thing the OLC often has to fix, a bill might define a state in a way that only applies to the 50 states, inadvertently excluding Washington, D.C. and tribal nations. Today’s AI-drafted bills are also said to often lack nuance, as with whether funding for a program should come via a “tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant.”
Requests for OLC services in the first 60 days of the current Congress are up 72 percent over the same period two years ago. The risk seen by House veterans is that members unwilling to wait for the services of a bogged-down OLC may introduce raw AI-generated bill text. So far, at least, “No bills that have been voted on by either chamber have been shown to be entirely crafted by AI.”
The OLC is investigating an obvious partial fix: using AI tools as part of the legislative proofreading process. They are already well-suited to verifying that laws cited in draft legislation are accurately represented, and not the hallucinations of another AI.
No one quoted in the article mentions any concern that present or future AIs might slant legislative outcomes according to their own preferences, whether through unintentional bias or Machiavellian intent. I don’t expect legal maneuvering to play a central role in an AI takeover, but I do expect power-seeking AIs to deliberately try to bias laws in ways that would further their plans, as part of keeping their options open and greasing the gears of a more technological takeover. If we make superintelligent competitors for our planet’s resources, they won’t limit themselves to one lane.
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.