▲ | abeppu 2 days ago | |||||||
> In recent weeks, she’s documented three instances of judges citing fake legal authority in their decisions. So lawyers use it, judges use it ... have we seen evidence of lawmakers submitting AI-generated language in bills or amendments? | ||||||||
▲ | at-fates-hands 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
>> lawmakers submitting AI-generated language in bills or amendments? Most people would be shocked to find the majority of bills are simply copycat bills or written by lobbyists. https://goodparty.org/blog/article/who-actually-writes-congr... Bank lobbyists, for example, authored 70 of the 85 lines in a Congressional bill that was designed to lessen banking regulations – essentially making their industry wealthier and more powerful. Our elected officials are quite literally, with no exaggeration, letting massive special interests write in the actual language of these bills in order to further enrich and empower themselves… because they are too lazy or disinterested in the actual work of lawmaking themselves. a two-year investigation by USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and The Center for Public Integrity found widespread use of “copycat bills” at both federal and state levels. Copycat legislation is the phenomenon in which lawmakers introduce bills that contain identical langauge and phrases to “model bills” that are drafted by corporations and special interests for lobbying purposes. In other words, these lawmakers essentially copy-pasted the exact words that lobbyists sent them. From 2011 to 2019, this investigation found over 10,000 copycat bills that lifted entire passages directly from well-funded lobbyists and corporations. 2,100 of these copycat bills were signed into law all across the country. And more often than not, these copycat bills contain provisions specifically designed to enrich or protect the corporations that wrote the initial drafts | ||||||||
▲ | milesvp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
I know a lawyer who almost took a job in state government where one of the primary duties was to make sure that the punctuation in the bills going through the state legislature were correct and accurate. For her, part of the appeal of the job, was that it would allow her to subtly alter the meaning of a bill being presented. Apparently it is a non trivial skill to be able to determine how judges are likely to rule on cases due to say, the presence, or the absence of an oxford comma. There was an entire team dedicated to this work, and the hours were insane when the legislature was in session. She ended up not taking the job because of the downsides associated with moving to the capital, so I don't know more about the job. I'd be curious how much AI has changed what that team does now. Certainly, they still would want to meticulously look at every character, but it is certainly possible that AI has gotten better at analyzing the "average" ruling, which might make the job a little easier. What I know about law though, is that it's often defined by the non average ruling, that there's sort of a fractal nature to it, and it's the unusual cases that often forever shape future interpretations of a given law. Unusual scenarios are something that LLMs generally struggle with, and add to that the need to creatively come up with scenarios that might further distort the bill, and I'd expect LLMs to be patently bad at creating laws. So while, I have no doubt that legislators (and lobbyists) are using AI to draft bills, I am positive that there is still a lot of work that goes into refining bills, and we're probably not seeing straight vibe drafting. | ||||||||
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▲ | unmole 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
> have we seen evidence of lawmakers submitting AI-generated language in bills or amendments? MPs are definitely using AI to write their speeches in parliament: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/11/chatgpt-trig... | ||||||||
▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
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▲ | dylan604 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
I mean, we've seen laws that were written by lobbyists with zero changes. Does it matter if it was AI generated or not at that point? The congress critters are not rewriting what they've been told to do if they've even read it after being told what to do. |