Last month, the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Centre for Innovation in Parliament published a collection of AI use cases for parliaments.
Use cases describe how legislative bodies can leverage AI systems to classify data, aid in bill drafting and managing legislative amendments, and assist with translation as well as transcription of recorded audio. Other use cases cover how parliaments can use AI to support engagement with the public, to provide support to users of online systems, and to strengthen cybersecurity.
The collection includes contributions from national legislative chambers in Brazil, Estonia, Finland, Israel, and Italy, as well as from the European Parliament. The resource states that these use cases "have been developed by parliaments for their own use and are shared here to help others to plan, develop and measure the implementation of systems that use AI."
As the use cases in the collection demonstrate, AI tools have a great potential to improve how legislative bodies serve the public. Use cases dealing with how AI can support staff in performing administrative work, customer service tasks, and managing existing legislative processes are well-covered in the collection. Though, there are a few areas where the resource could benefit from additional types of use cases.
One topic that is largely absent from the resource is a discussion of how parliaments can use new technologies to support large-scale engagements with the public to create more legitimate and higher-quality legislation. There is a growing body of use cases demonstrating how AI can help to facilitate online dialogues with large groups, and to make it quicker and easier for institutions to summarize, organize, and draw conclusions from the large volumes of data that engagements produce. While the public engagement section of the collection includes one use case about better processing of residents’ comments, the section largely focuses on ideas to make it easier for the public to access and understand legislative information. The resource could be strengthened by incorporating more ideas around how AI can support new and better forms of public participation in the lawmaking process.
Another area that the collection could explore further is the role AI can play in supporting legislatures’ research and evidence-gathering processes. From the regulation of nuclear energy to the creation of new tax credits, legislative staff are tasked with getting smart on a variety of topics rapidly. AI can help parliamentary staff to search for high-quality evidence quickly, and to evaluate whether legislation had its intended impact. For example, Policy Synth, developed by The GovLab and Citizens Foundation, is one example of a toolkit that legislative staff can use to conduct large-scale automated web research on a wide range of topics with the help of generative AI.
Explore the IPU’s full AI use case collection here. The resource is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
