The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has approved a rule

The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has approved a rule written by ChatGPT

But the city council, which was considering it, only announced it after the city council approved it

In October, the 36 members of the city council of Porto Alegre, a Brazilian city of 1.5 million people, unanimously approved a rule written entirely by ChatGPT software. The law, which allows citizens to have stolen water meters replaced free of charge, came into effect on November 23, but until a week ago most city councilors did not know that it had been written by an “artificial intelligence.”

They learned the truth last Wednesday when Ramiro Rosário, the city councilor who proposed the law, announced it publicly announced. In an interview with The Washington Post, Rosário said he was thrilled to have written an act in just 15 seconds, a process that would normally take at least three days, by simply giving ChatGPT a text command of a few hundred characters.

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Rosário explained that he had inserted the following as an order: “Write a municipal ordinance for the city of Porto Alegre, of a legislative and non-executive nature, which prohibits the municipal Department of Water and Sewerage from requiring the owner of the property to pay a. “new water meter in case of theft”. He added that he was “amazed” by the result and that the proposal drawn up by ChatGPT exceeded his expectations: it included ideas that had not occurred to him, such as setting a deadline of 30 days within which the municipality is obliged to replace stolen meters.

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Rosário also said that he is quite optimistic about the future of these technologies and that he hopes that their use for legislative purposes will become more widespread: “I come back to the phrase that has already become a cliché in this topic: Nobody will be replaced by “artificial intelligence, but we could all be replaced by those who know how to use artificial intelligence,” he said. “That’s why we have to prepare for this path.”

He added that he waited a few weeks to reveal the truth because if he had said it sooner, the proposal probably would not have even come to a vote: “Many of my colleagues still have prejudices against artificial intelligence, and I didn’t want that. “There is a risk that a useful and fair law will not be voted on just because it was written by a chatbot.”

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Not all city councilors reacted positively to Rosário’s revelation: Council President Hamilton Sossmeier told local newspapers that it could set a “dangerous precedent.”

However, this is not the first time that artificial intelligence has been used to write legislation: in January, Senator Barry Finegold of Massachusetts (USA) used ChatGPT to write a proposal that would regulate generative artificial intelligence models.

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