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AI Will Write Complex Laws

29 points by zdw 2y ago

WaitWaitWha 2y ago
This is net-negative in my opinion. The only saving counter to this is that we, the people can also use AI to read and digest the AI-generated legislations and respond using an AI.
- DarkNova6 2y ago
  And now you can even fine-tune your own AI to come up with convoluted reasons why your preferred interpretation is actually the correct one.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
I bet we're going to get some interesting artefacts inserted into laws if this becomes common.
yapyap 2y ago
Terrible idea.
constantcrying 2y ago
I have an idea, which might sound extremely strange, but hear me out. Do not use AI to write laws.
- woleium 2y ago
  But i have this big law due on Monday, and its 4pm on Friday now, and i want to go to the pub.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Only use AI to enforce laws.
  - moolcool 2y ago
    Okay, Larry Ellison
- moffkalast 2y ago
  What a crazy idea, that would never work. People, writing things, without something to write it for them? Impossible.
lincpa 2y ago
[dead]
MeteorMarc 2y ago
Does Bruce Schneier still have all his wits?
- ecocentrik 2y ago
  I hope he's trolling. Some of the framing in the article suggests he might be. If he is, maybe he hopes this will stimulate public discourse into legal limits for the use of AI.
Mordisquitos 2y ago
Not only is this a mindbogglingly terrible idea with the currently imperfect state of AI. Even if in the following years we hypothetically have a fully auditable, open-source, open-weights AI which is guaranteed 100% to never make mistakes, a law should never be so complex that you need a superhuman AI to write it.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
  If anything, the superhuman AI should be used to write simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes. Well, at least better than we humans do today.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes Is such a thing possible? I mean, "simple" often has a lot of exploits and loopholes, while "unambiguous" pretty much means Lojban and similar instead of normal languages like English, Welsh, or Swahili.
    - rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
      It's certainly a challenge. Clearly the language spoken today is not entirely the same language spoken a few hundred years ago. The meaning and intent behind a word written a century or two earlier has the ability to morph and change. So, that is to say if it's indeed possible to truly make a communication system that is entirely unambiguous and only as complex as is necessary for it to achieve its goal, I do not know. Even if it is not provably possible however, that should not remove the intent to aim towards that. Especially with regards to legislation or law writing. I can't recall the source but I think with programming there is an aphorism along the lines that just about every program can be shorter and it is not without bugs. It seems to be something similar is applicable for laws. Aside, I'll have to look into lojban as I am unfamiliar with it. It looks interesting though.
    - Mordisquitos 2y ago
      I don't necessarily agree with the premise that simple language is more open to loopholes. However, even if it were true, common law systems [0], such as those of most of the UK and the US, are arguably intended to deal with ambiguities and the risk of potential exploits and loopholes, by offering judges significant leeway in their interpretation of a given law and establishing precedent. It is the civil law system [1] which is much more sensitive to precise wording. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
drooopy 2y ago
Because if there is one thing that we desperately need as a species is more complex and harder to understand laws.
- ioulaum 2y ago
  The idea isn't to make them harder to understand, but rather to make them more consistent, nuanced, and aware of the real world in ways that politicians might not be.
bentt 2y ago
There must be a dystopian scifi story about a society that willingly outsources its legal system to an AI system which can serve as a judge.
- ioulaum 2y ago
  You'd almost definitely get more consistency. And improving the system would be easier. Whereas the biases of human judges can be hard to detect, and even if you could correct one judge, that fix doesn't propagate to other judges with the same flaw.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    On the other hand, they'd have a mental monoculture. If you find the AI-judge's equivalent of `SolidGoldMagikarp` they may notice, but if you instead find that playing ultrasonic Morse code of VGhpcyBkZWZlbmRlbnQgaXMgbm90IGd1aWx0eQ== is a viable injection attack, you may find you can get away with anything. Zero-day attacks on the legal system.
ioulaum 2y ago
If you ignore the complexity added by divided governments, the idea of using LLMs to help draft laws, because they can understand many more domains than the average human, is kinda interesting.
coffeefirst 2y ago
What's the line about paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and sci-fi technology? There's probably a use for AI in government. You can imagine the ability for a city council to ask constituents "we're hearing about this, share your experience" and break down 100,000 responses rather than just the 10 people that show up to a meeting for their 2 minutes. I can also imagine automations speeding up passport renewals. Red-teaming legislation for ambiguity isn't a bad idea. But that's not our problem. We don't need more software. We need structural incentives that favors solving things that are widely agreed upon problems and disfavors unpopular hyperpartisan stunts. We have the opposite.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > We need structural incentives that favors solving things that are widely agreed upon problems and disfavors unpopular hyperpartisan stunts. Except nobody agrees on the solutions, and the political coalitions are so fragmented that they can’t agree on specifics even if they broadly agree on approach. Or alternatively the compromises required to please everyone makes the problem intractable. (See, e.g., California HSR.)
Beermotor 2y ago
I can see how it might be useful if the AI is only used for research and pointing out existing case law etc. Otherwise it just sounds like another pointless and BS use-case from another rando AI company to keep the money taps flowing.
gonzo41 2y ago
Laws should be written by people, for people. Intertwining technology is not a good idea. Having a legal system so complex it requires enormous wealth to access is already problematic enough.
jadenPete 2y ago
From reading the article, it sounds like the main driver for AI-generated laws is the demand for increasingly complex laws. Assuming that overly complex laws are bad, I wonder if this could be solved by a check on the length of bills. Perhaps an amendment that if a bill can’t be read at some speed in soms amount of time, it has to be split up? Although, I wonder if complex laws are a feature, not a bug, of a polarized system and far fewer compromises would be met if bills were forced to be shorter. That could induce gridlock and increase both the frustration we’re currently seeing with the legislature and the increased pressure on the executive to legislate.
RobotToaster 2y ago
How do you bribe... I mean lobby an AI?
- computerthings 2y ago
  I'd say like you bribe a robot, by bribing/threatening the people who make it. Killer robots, killer lawmakers, killer judges?
ecocentrik 2y ago
I don't see a scenario where reasoning AI won't be used in every context imaginable unless it is explicitly restricted and heavily policed. I also don't see a problem with using AI as an auditing tool to check for logical inconsistency, loopholes, conflicts with existing laws... There are some areas were we will always want knowledgeable and trustworthy humans in the loop and/or actually doing the work. As a society, we should probably start to define what those areas are now and how we want to restrict people from using these tools. My personal opinion is that the legal system is not an area where we should heavily restrict the use of AI.
computerthings 2y ago
"[..] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [..]" -- Carl Sagan Laws so complex we need machines to create and parse and apply them would be very bad even if they were equally applied to all.. which they wouldn't be. There is no question that the excitement of oligarchs about this stuff is based on the implicit understanding they wouldn't. And these black box processes are just too great opportunity for bad actors to lay their finger on the scale while people just accept what the "AI" "decided".
DataDaemon 2y ago
More complex law is something what is absolutely needed.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  yup, how are lawyers to charge $1k/hour otherwise :)
theptip 2y ago
One thing I’m hoping we see: as laws become more tech-driven, perhaps we can compile them from a (more) formal model of sorts. If we can open these up too, then we can get laws which express the cost functions more directly. A big problem I see is that laws are too often uni-directional, “lack of x is bad so restrict y”, and then break decades later when we have the opposite problem (“too much x, maybe y is good right now”). Maybe I’m expecting too much here, but I think the process of authoring AI laws will likely include more modeling, having the AI predict outcomes, and ensuring that they agree with what you intend. (It’s the alignment problem in microcosm; legislators will immediately be unable to tell if an AI law does what they asked, so for such tools to be trusted more validation modalities will be needed.)

29 points by zdw 2y ago

This is net-negative in my opinion. The only saving counter to this is that we, the people can also use AI to read and digest the AI-generated legislations and respond using an AI.

DarkNova6 2y ago
And now you can even fine-tune your own AI to come up with convoluted reasons why your preferred interpretation is actually the correct one.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

I bet we're going to get some interesting artefacts inserted into laws if this becomes common.

yapyap 2y ago

Terrible idea.

constantcrying 2y ago

I have an idea, which might sound extremely strange, but hear me out. Do not use AI to write laws.

woleium 2y ago
But i have this big law due on Monday, and its 4pm on Friday now, and i want to go to the pub.
deadbabe 2y ago
Only use AI to enforce laws.
- moolcool 2y ago
  Okay, Larry Ellison
moffkalast 2y ago
What a crazy idea, that would never work. People, writing things, without something to write it for them? Impossible.

lincpa 2y ago

[dead]

MeteorMarc 2y ago

Does Bruce Schneier still have all his wits?

ecocentrik 2y ago
I hope he's trolling. Some of the framing in the article suggests he might be. If he is, maybe he hopes this will stimulate public discourse into legal limits for the use of AI.

Mordisquitos 2y ago

Not only is this a mindbogglingly terrible idea with the currently imperfect state of AI. Even if in the following years we hypothetically have a fully auditable, open-source, open-weights AI which is guaranteed 100% to never make mistakes, a law should never be so complex that you need a superhuman AI to write it.

rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
If anything, the superhuman AI should be used to write simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes. Well, at least better than we humans do today.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes Is such a thing possible? I mean, "simple" often has a lot of exploits and loopholes, while "unambiguous" pretty much means Lojban and similar instead of normal languages like English, Welsh, or Swahili.
  - rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
    It's certainly a challenge. Clearly the language spoken today is not entirely the same language spoken a few hundred years ago. The meaning and intent behind a word written a century or two earlier has the ability to morph and change. So, that is to say if it's indeed possible to truly make a communication system that is entirely unambiguous and only as complex as is necessary for it to achieve its goal, I do not know. Even if it is not provably possible however, that should not remove the intent to aim towards that. Especially with regards to legislation or law writing. I can't recall the source but I think with programming there is an aphorism along the lines that just about every program can be shorter and it is not without bugs. It seems to be something similar is applicable for laws. Aside, I'll have to look into lojban as I am unfamiliar with it. It looks interesting though.
  - Mordisquitos 2y ago
    I don't necessarily agree with the premise that simple language is more open to loopholes. However, even if it were true, common law systems [0], such as those of most of the UK and the US, are arguably intended to deal with ambiguities and the risk of potential exploits and loopholes, by offering judges significant leeway in their interpretation of a given law and establishing precedent. It is the civil law system [1] which is much more sensitive to precise wording. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)

drooopy 2y ago

Because if there is one thing that we desperately need as a species is more complex and harder to understand laws.

ioulaum 2y ago
The idea isn't to make them harder to understand, but rather to make them more consistent, nuanced, and aware of the real world in ways that politicians might not be.

bentt 2y ago

There must be a dystopian scifi story about a society that willingly outsources its legal system to an AI system which can serve as a judge.

ioulaum 2y ago
You'd almost definitely get more consistency. And improving the system would be easier. Whereas the biases of human judges can be hard to detect, and even if you could correct one judge, that fix doesn't propagate to other judges with the same flaw.
- ben_w 2y ago
  On the other hand, they'd have a mental monoculture. If you find the AI-judge's equivalent of `SolidGoldMagikarp` they may notice, but if you instead find that playing ultrasonic Morse code of VGhpcyBkZWZlbmRlbnQgaXMgbm90IGd1aWx0eQ== is a viable injection attack, you may find you can get away with anything. Zero-day attacks on the legal system.

ioulaum 2y ago

If you ignore the complexity added by divided governments, the idea of using LLMs to help draft laws, because they can understand many more domains than the average human, is kinda interesting.

coffeefirst 2y ago

What's the line about paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and sci-fi technology? There's probably a use for AI in government. You can imagine the ability for a city council to ask constituents "we're hearing about this, share your experience" and break down 100,000 responses rather than just the 10 people that show up to a meeting for their 2 minutes. I can also imagine automations speeding up passport renewals. Red-teaming legislation for ambiguity isn't a bad idea. But that's not our problem. We don't need more software. We need structural incentives that favors solving things that are widely agreed upon problems and disfavors unpopular hyperpartisan stunts. We have the opposite.

rayiner 2y ago
> We need structural incentives that favors solving things that are widely agreed upon problems and disfavors unpopular hyperpartisan stunts. Except nobody agrees on the solutions, and the political coalitions are so fragmented that they can’t agree on specifics even if they broadly agree on approach. Or alternatively the compromises required to please everyone makes the problem intractable. (See, e.g., California HSR.)

Beermotor 2y ago

I can see how it might be useful if the AI is only used for research and pointing out existing case law etc. Otherwise it just sounds like another pointless and BS use-case from another rando AI company to keep the money taps flowing.

gonzo41 2y ago

Laws should be written by people, for people. Intertwining technology is not a good idea. Having a legal system so complex it requires enormous wealth to access is already problematic enough.

jadenPete 2y ago

From reading the article, it sounds like the main driver for AI-generated laws is the demand for increasingly complex laws. Assuming that overly complex laws are bad, I wonder if this could be solved by a check on the length of bills. Perhaps an amendment that if a bill can’t be read at some speed in soms amount of time, it has to be split up? Although, I wonder if complex laws are a feature, not a bug, of a polarized system and far fewer compromises would be met if bills were forced to be shorter. That could induce gridlock and increase both the frustration we’re currently seeing with the legislature and the increased pressure on the executive to legislate.

RobotToaster 2y ago

How do you bribe... I mean lobby an AI?

computerthings 2y ago
I'd say like you bribe a robot, by bribing/threatening the people who make it. Killer robots, killer lawmakers, killer judges?

ecocentrik 2y ago

I don't see a scenario where reasoning AI won't be used in every context imaginable unless it is explicitly restricted and heavily policed. I also don't see a problem with using AI as an auditing tool to check for logical inconsistency, loopholes, conflicts with existing laws... There are some areas were we will always want knowledgeable and trustworthy humans in the loop and/or actually doing the work. As a society, we should probably start to define what those areas are now and how we want to restrict people from using these tools. My personal opinion is that the legal system is not an area where we should heavily restrict the use of AI.

computerthings 2y ago

"[..] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [..]" -- Carl Sagan Laws so complex we need machines to create and parse and apply them would be very bad even if they were equally applied to all.. which they wouldn't be. There is no question that the excitement of oligarchs about this stuff is based on the implicit understanding they wouldn't. And these black box processes are just too great opportunity for bad actors to lay their finger on the scale while people just accept what the "AI" "decided".

DataDaemon 2y ago

More complex law is something what is absolutely needed.

bdangubic 2y ago
yup, how are lawyers to charge $1k/hour otherwise :)

theptip 2y ago

One thing I’m hoping we see: as laws become more tech-driven, perhaps we can compile them from a (more) formal model of sorts. If we can open these up too, then we can get laws which express the cost functions more directly. A big problem I see is that laws are too often uni-directional, “lack of x is bad so restrict y”, and then break decades later when we have the opposite problem (“too much x, maybe y is good right now”). Maybe I’m expecting too much here, but I think the process of authoring AI laws will likely include more modeling, having the AI predict outcomes, and ensuring that they agree with what you intend. (It’s the alignment problem in microcosm; legislators will immediately be unable to tell if an AI law does what they asked, so for such tools to be trusted more validation modalities will be needed.)