"Write the first draft you want someone to send" is good advice. If you want a colleague to write you a recommendation, do a draft letter. If you want a friend to introduce you to someone, do a draft email. By the same token, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a powerful corporate lobbying group, writes first drafts of bills that benefit corporations. These "model bills" give legislators, hungry for a "win," something they can introduce.
By the same token, argues Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders in "How AI Could Write Our Laws" in the MIT Tech Review, AI will make it easier for lobbyists to analyze the corpus of US law, find opportunities to introduce new legislation, and draft those proposals in ways that are more likely to achieve the desired result. Such assistive AI will be ALEC on steroids:
"The transformative benefit that AI offers to lobbyists and their clients is scale. While individual lobbyists tend to focus on the federal level or a single state, with AI assistance they could more easily infiltrate a large number of state-level (or even local-level) law-making bodies and elections. At that level, where the average cost of a seat is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions, a single donor can wield a lot of influence—if automation makes it possible to coordinate lobbying across districts."
Generative AI is making it easier both to draft but also analyze content at scale and this could have a transformative effect on the legislative process. But the same tools being used by the "bad guys" to spot loopholes are also those that can be used by the "good guys" to improve the quality of lawmaking.
But Congress is already using assistive AI to compare drafts of bills. The Comparative Print Suite allows staff to directly compare two versions of a bill —"to easily see which changes have been made through line edits or amendments or to see how a bill would change a current law," writes POPVOX Foundation. When we can spot discrepancies and redundancies, we can improve the quality of legislation.
As discussed in a recent hearing, the Library of Congress is working with the Congressional Research Service, leveraging AI to assist analysts in creating high-quality summaries of pending bills for Congress.gov. The agencies are also experimenting with using AI to extract geographic information from within legislative text. Geographic information could aid in analyzing policy impacts, ensure equitable resource allocation, and enhance legislative oversight and public accountability by highlighting the regional focus of laws.
Argentina also has AI-enabled drafting tools to support compliance with the parliament’s manual of style. ELEIA, an amalgamation of law (ley) and artificial intelligence (inteligencia artificial), developed by the Parliament’s in-house innovation lab, is billed as a technical assistant for “legislative knowledge management support.” Designed to improve the quality of drafted laws, ELEIA guides the user through the drafting process. The tool also predicts the committees to which a bill is likely to be referred once introduced.
In Italy, the Senate does more with AI to improve drafting. It uses AI in real time to help organize the bill amendment process. Members propose amendments to legislation. Often those amendments are introduced solely for the purpose of having one’s say on the floor but the language does not differ markedly from the original. Alternatively, opposition members may introduce thousands of amendments in order to slow down the enactment process in the Italian version of filibustering.
Given the amount of money spent on lobbying each year, the article correctly anticipates that there will be "bad guys" hacking the system. As with every new technology, there is already an arms race against those wishing to use the tools for exploitation, which is why we urgently need to invest more in putting these tools in the hands both of Congress and its support agencies but, more urgently, helping a broader public committed to taking advantage of AI to improve the quality of lawmaking.
