A bill drafted entirely by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool was passed into law in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre (south), revealed Wednesday the councilman in charge of the initiative, who surprised his colleagues with the “experiment” to put the technology under debate.
“The first Brazilian law made exclusively by artificial intelligence is in force here in Porto Alegre,” announced in a video posted on social networks Ramiro Rosário, legislator of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB, center) in the legislature of the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, who was listed until now as the author of the project.
The initiative, which exempts citizens from paying for a new water consumption meter in case of theft, was approved unanimously among legislators who did not know its true authorship, last October 18, and came into force on the 23rd of this month after the sanction of the mayor, Sebastiao Melo.
“In addition to meeting an important demand for the city, we are generating a debate on the use of technology, of artificial intelligence, to improve the quality of public service in Brazil,” Rosário, 37, who defines himself as a “curious” about technology, told AFP.
Without informing his colleagues, the councilman “wanted to demonstrate the technical condition of the text to go through all the legal requirements until it was sanctioned”, he explained.
The president of the municipal legislature, the evangelical pastor Hamilton Sossmeier (PTB), told the g1 news site that “there is no law prohibiting” the use of artificial intelligence, but “it is a dangerous precedent” and “lit an alert”.
With his “experiment”, Rosário tested in his legislative task the use of ChatGPT, from the American company OpenAI, by asking him to elaborate a municipal project for the ‘gaúcha’ city on the prohibition of charging the owner of the property the cost of the measuring device, if it were stolen.
The request gave rise in a matter of seconds to a text with eight articles and justifications, in addition to adding a deadline (not required) for the replacement of the device, among other points.
The legislator even used the tool to make some cuts and formal adjustments to the text, which was finally included in a 1987 law.
Despite the ironies on social networks that suggested Rosário’s dismissal after becoming “unnecessary”, the legislator says that the result proves that it is possible “to reduce the number of parliamentarians in Brazil, of advisors, of public servants and bring a greater capacity for legislative production”, he said, convinced that technology will bring new opportunities.