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- A city in Brazil unanimously passed a bill entirely drafted by ChatGPT.
- After the bill became law, the sponsor revealed that it was AI-generated.
- The sponsor told BI that he kept the AI component secret to ensure the bill actually got voted on.
A bill about water meters that a Brazilian city council unanimously voted to pass in October was revealed to have been entirely written by ChatGPT, its sponsor disclosed last week in an X post.
The law came into effect on November 23. Six days later, Porto Alegre councilman Ramiro Rosário shared that the legislation was written by OpenAI's chatbot, The Washington Post reported.
The councilman told The Post that the bill was not the product of days of legislative brainstorming, but rather emerged after about 15 seconds from a ChatGPT command of some 250 characters.
ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, generates responses by predicting what comes next in a sentence, based on patterns it learned during training.
Rosário told The Post that the command he input into ChatGPT was: "Create a municipal law for the city of Porto Alegre, originating from the legislature and not the executive, which prohibits the Municipal Water and Sewage Department from charging the owner of the property for the payment of a new water meter when it is stolen."
In response, ChatGPT responded with solutions that "astounded" Rosário, he told The Post, suggesting two innovative ideas for a problem that plagued his constituents for months.
He said the proposals were a 30-day deadline for the city to replace stolen water meters and a provision waiving water bills if the deadline wasn't met, according to The Post.
The AI-generated response was approved by all 36 members of the council, who did not know that it was AI-generated, The Post reported.
It had also been vetted by several council committees, with the legislative drafting branch only making small changes to the wording of the bill, the newspaper said.
Rosário told The Post that this experiment was performed to bring about "the debate surrounding the beginning of a great technological revolution."
Last Wednesday, when was revealed that ChatGPT formulated the bill, it was met with skepticism by the city council's president.
According to the Associated Press, Hamilton Sossmeier initially said it set a "dangerous precedent" and was annoyed that Rosário wasn't transparent about ChatGPT having written the proposal.
However, Sossmeier told AP that he has since changed his mind. He said: "I started to read more in-depth and saw that, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is going to be a trend."
Rosário told Business Insider that he kept the fact that it was generated by ChatGPT a secret because he feared that lawmakers' prejudices about AI might have prevented it from even being voted on.
"By announcing that artificial intelligence wrote the text only after its plenary approval and sanction by the mayor, I ensured the process progressed without any external interference," he said.
Reflecting on the significance of the AI-generated proposal, Rosário told BI: "I support the idea that artificial intelligence can help optimize resources and the time of political agents and public servants, allowing them to focus on what is truly essential for their work."