New York State Rep. Clyde Vanel used artificial intelligence to draft a housing bill.
Artificial intelligence can drive cars, write books, answer customer questions on the Internet, there seems to be no stopping it. In New York, a local elected official even decided to ask AI to write a law.
Clyde Vanel, the elected official in question, represents the Queens district in the New York State Assembly. He is a democrat, a lawyer by training and a member of the commission on Internet and new technologies. He tells the New York Times that he does not want to be a Luddite, these English artisans from the beginning of the 19th centurye century, at war against progress and the machines of the industrial revolution. He wondered if artificial intelligence could one day replace it. He used AutoGPT, a variation of the now famous ChatGPT, to see the result, thinking that perhaps the AI would come up with a law offering solutions to a problem he hadn’t thought of. And the text produced impressed him, he assures us, even if with his team, he had to go back to refine it.
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A prison sentence for some owners
Assembly Bill 6896, a law giving tenants the right to ask their homeowners for a new copy of the rental agreement. What Clyde Vanel asked AutoGPT at the start was quite broad, without any particular connection to the housing problem: you are a local elected official in New York, analyze state law and find loopholes to fill in the legislation. The system needed about three hours to propose laws, one on the carrying of weapons in particular. Clyde Vanel accepted this proposal on housing, without really understanding how AutoGPT had arrived at this result.
Clyde Vanel specifies that he had to make some adjustments. For example, artificial intelligence went a bit far in his view by suggesting a prison sentence if the landlord did not give this copy of the rental contract to the tenant. It also limited the number of requests for copies to two per year to avoid abuse. The fact that the text – quite short in fact – was prepared with artificial intelligence is clearly indicated in the bill.
A “vague” impact
This piece of legislation was not necessarily well received. A lawyer complained in the press that if legislators want to know what problem to solve, it is better to ask their fellow citizens rather than artificial intelligence. Same message from associations for whom the emergency in terms of housing lies elsewhere than in this proposal. Artificial intelligence, which aggregates more than it analyzes, has clearly not been able to identify constructive solutions to housing problems in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Clearly, the law, if it is ever implemented, will not change the lives of New Yorkers. Its impact would even rather remain “wave”according to New York Times. The daily also quotes an ethics professor who wonders how voters will judge the work of an elected official in the campaign if the laws he proposes come from artificial intelligence. Clyde Vanel, in any case, plans to try the experiment again in the coming months.