Brazilian city enacts an ordinance that was secretly written by ChatGPT

City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation's first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn't know it at the time. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy. Rosário told The Associated Press that he asked OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT to craft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. He then presented it to his 35 peers on the council without making a single change or even letting them know about its unprecedented origin. "If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn't even have been taken to a vote," Rosário told the AP by phone. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23. "It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence," he added. Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.3 million, is the second-largest city in Brazil's south. The city's council president, Hamilton Sossmeier, found out that Rosário had enlisted ChatGPT to write the proposal when the councilman bragged about the achievement on social media. Sossmeier initially told local media he thought it was a "dangerous precedent." The AI large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT work by repeatedly trying to guess the next word in a sentence and are prone to making up false information, a phenomenon sometimes called hallucination. In an article published on the website of Harvard Law School's Center of Legal Profession earlier last year, Andrew Perlman, dean at Suffolk University Law School, wrote that ChatGPT "may portend an even more momentous shift than the advent of the internet," but also warned of its potential shortcomings. This article was provided by The Associated Press.