IN his short story titled “The Beheading of the Heads,” the late, great Italian writer Italo Calvino recounted a visit to the capital of an unnamed country where the heads of government served a fixed term, at the end of which they were publicly beheaded. Why? Because otherwise, “everybody would want to be a leader. ‘Here I am, take me, I’m ready!’ ” And “what sort of leaders would those be?”
In Porto Alegre, Brazil, a non-fictional city in a non-fictional country, a councilman believes that there is a less grisly way to improve the work of politicians: replace them with computers. According to the Wall Street Journal, 37-year-old Ramiro Rosário “passed the country’s first law in November that was written entirely by ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by the San Francisco startup OpenAI. The law itself was purposefully boring — a proposal to stop the local water company from charging residents for new water meters when they were stolen from their front yards. It would easily pass, calculated Rosário.”
The southern city of Porto Alegre has 35 other council members. “Under normal circumstances,” the Journal said, “it would have taken his six-person team several days to draft the bill. There would have been lengthy discussions over the legalese, interjected with dozens of coffee breaks and some heated discussions over the performance of Grêmio, one of the city’s local soccer teams.”
Rosário’s “assistant would have had to figure out the inner workings of DMAE, Porto Alegre’s water and sewage authority. (Rosário said he had asked DMAE for help but they never replied to his message. DMAE didn’t reply to a reporter’s request for comment about not replying to Rosário’s request.) Then some poor soul would have had to check if the bill was even constitutional, Rósario said — no small feat given that Brazil’s constitution is 64,488 words-long, outdone only by those of India and Nigeria. Add to that several typically protracted Brazilian working lunches — followed by more coffee — and perhaps one of the country’s many public holidays, which if on a Thursday would have been unofficially extended to Monday.”
Rosario said “none of that was necessary. ChatGPT got the job done in 15 seconds.”
How did he —and ChatGPT — do it?
“Rosário sat down in front of his computer back in June and described the bill he wanted in a sentence. A perfectly crafted law with eight articles came back, including a clause Rosário had never thought of: if the water authority didn’t replace the stolen meter within 30 days the property owner would be exempt from paying their bill.
“ ‘Who knows where she got the 30-day thing from! She went above and beyond!’ said Rosário, an AI enthusiast who said he likes to talk to ‘her’ daily. After the release of ChatGPT’s latest vocal version in Brazil, the chatbot has taken on a friendly woman’s voice with a slight country twang….
“ ‘There was one day I asked for help in the kitchen. I told her: “Listen, all I have in the fridge is a mango, a lime, an apple, and an open bottle of wine,” Rosário digressed. She came up with a recipe for pasta with mango sauce and told him to drink the rest of the wine. ‘It was delicious!’ ”
Rosário said he “put the drafted legislation up for vote exactly as ChatGPT had written it. It was unanimously approved by the city’s other councilors and signed into law by Porto Alegre’s mayor at the end of November. ChatGPT even whipped up the press release.”
The Journal said “other countries have embarked on similar experiments. A judge in Colombia recently used the chatbot to decide whether an autistic child’s insurance should cover his medical treatment, while an Indian judge called on it to help determine whether a murder suspect should be granted bail.”
Rosário’s cause, the Journal added, was a noble one. “Brazil spends more than 13% of its gross domestic product on the salaries and pensions of public servants. He wanted to demonstrate how much more efficient and cost-effective the government could be if it employed AI instead of so many people.”
But the idea “isn’t to replace all politicians and public servants, just some of them, he said with a grin. He cited, for example, the city hall’s public-relations assistants down the hall who write news releases like the one ChatGPT just churned out. ‘There must be 20 or 30 of them — they probably won’t be needed in the future, well, to be honest, they’re already no longer needed.’ ”
“Voters were delighted by Rosário’s maneuver,” the Journal said. “ ‘I’d choose artificial intelligence over the intelligence of politicians any day,’ said Adriano Soares, a 21-year-old student in the city. Politicians frequently rank as society’s most hated group in Brazil. Only 34% of Brazilians in a study last year said they trusted the government, an understandable reaction given recent figures showing that one in three members of Brazil’s Congress are under investigation for crimes ranging from graft to attempted homicide.”
There is just one drawback with Rosário’s “vision,” which could be off-putting in small jurisdictions like the CNMI.
ChatGPT can’t vote. Worse, it’s not related to other voters.
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