{"id":3993,"date":"2025-05-16T05:07:50","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T05:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/16\/ai-generated-law-html\/"},"modified":"2025-05-16T05:07:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T05:07:50","slug":"ai-generated-law-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/16\/ai-generated-law-html\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-Generated Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
AI-Generated Law<\/div>\n

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On April 14, Dubai\u2019s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum,\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that the United Arab Emirates would begin using\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to \u201cregularly suggest updates\u201d to the law and \u201caccelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.\u201d AI would create a \u201ccomprehensive legislative plan\u201d spanning local and federal law and would be connected to public administration, the courts, and global policy trends.<\/p>\n

The plan was widely greeted with astonishment. This sort of AI legislating would be a global \u201cfirst<\/a>,\u201d with the potential to go \u201chorribly wrong<\/a>.\u201d Skeptics fear that the AI model will make up facts or fundamentally fail to understand societal tenets such as fair treatment and justice when influencing law.<\/p>\n

The truth is, the UAE\u2019s idea of AI-generated law is not really a first and not necessarily terrible.<\/p>\n

The first instance\u00a0of enacted law known to have been written by AI was\u00a0passed<\/a>\u00a0in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2023. It was a local ordinance about water meter replacement. Council member Ramiro Ros\u00e1rio was simply looking for help in generating and articulating ideas for solving a policy problem, and ChatGPT did well enough that the bill passed unanimously. We approve of AI assisting humans in this manner, although Ros\u00e1rio should have disclosed that the bill was written by AI before it was voted on.<\/p>\n

Brazil was a harbinger but hardly unique. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of attention-seeking politicians at the local and national level introducing\u00a0bills<\/a>\u00a0that they promote as being drafted by AI or letting AI write their\u00a0speeches<\/a>\u00a0for them or even\u00a0vocalize<\/a>\u00a0them in the chamber.<\/p>\n

The Emirati proposal is different from those examples in important ways. It promises to be more systemic and less of a one-off stunt. The UAE has promised to spend more than $3 billion to transform into an \u201cAI-native<\/a>\u201d government by 2027. Time will tell if it is also different in being more hype than reality.<\/p>\n

Rather than being a true first, the UAE\u2019s announcement is emblematic of a much\u00a0wider global trend<\/a>\u00a0of legislative bodies integrating AI assistive tools for legislative research, drafting, translation, data processing, and much more. Individual lawmakers have begun turning to AI drafting tools as they traditionally have relied on staffers, interns, or lobbyists. The French government has gone so far as to\u00a0train<\/a>\u00a0its own AI model to assist with legislative tasks.<\/p>\n

Even asking AI to comprehensively review and update legislation would not be a first. In 2020, the U.S. state of Ohio began using AI to do wholesale\u00a0revision<\/a>\u00a0of its administrative law. AI\u2019s speed is potentially a good match to this kind of large-scale editorial project; the state\u2019s then-lieutenant governor, Jon Husted, claims it was successful in eliminating\u00a02.2 million<\/a>\u00a0words\u2019 worth of unnecessary regulation from Ohio\u2019s code. Now a U.S. senator, Husted has recently\u00a0proposed<\/a>\u00a0to take the same approach to U.S. federal law, with an ideological bent promoting AI as a tool for systematic\u00a0deregulation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The dangers of confabulation and inhumanity\u2014while legitimate\u2014aren\u2019t really what makes the potential of AI-generated law novel. Humans make mistakes when writing law, too. Recall that a single\u00a0typo<\/a>\u00a0in a 900-page law nearly brought down the massive U.S. health care reforms of the Affordable Care Act in 2015, before the Supreme Court\u00a0excused<\/a>\u00a0the error. And, distressingly, the citizens and residents of nondemocratic states are already subject to arbitrary and often inhumane laws. (The UAE is a federation of monarchies without direct elections of legislators and with a poor record on political rights and civil liberties, as evaluated by\u00a0Freedom House<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The primary concern with using AI in lawmaking is that it will be wielded as a tool by the powerful to advance their own interests. AI may not fundamentally change lawmaking, but its superhuman capabilities have the potential to exacerbate the risks of power concentration.<\/p>\n

AI, and technology generally, is often invoked by politicians to give their project a patina of objectivity and rationality, but it doesn\u2019t really do any such thing. As proposed, AI would simply give the UAE\u2019s hereditary rulers new tools to express, enact, and enforce their preferred policies.<\/p>\n

Mohammed\u2019s emphasis that a primary benefit of AI will be to make law\u00a0faster<\/a>\u00a0is also misguided. The machine may write the text, but humans will still propose, debate, and vote on the legislation. Drafting is rarely the bottleneck in passing new law. What takes much longer is for humans to amend, horse-trade, and ultimately come to agreement on the content of that legislation\u2014even when that politicking is happening among a small group of monarchic elites.<\/p>\n

Rather than expeditiousness, the more important capability offered by AI is sophistication. AI has the potential to make law more\u00a0complex<\/a>, tailoring it to a multitude of different scenarios. The combination of AI\u2019s research and drafting speed makes it possible for it to outline legislation governing dozens, even thousands, of special cases for each proposed rule.<\/p>\n

But here again, this capability of AI opens the door for the powerful to have their way. AI\u2019s capacity to write complex law would allow the humans directing it to dictate their exacting policy preference for every special case. It could even embed those preferences surreptitiously.<\/p>\n

Since time immemorial,\u00a0legislators have carved out legal loopholes to narrowly cater to special interests. AI will be a\u00a0powerful<\/a>\u00a0tool for authoritarians, lobbyists, and other empowered interests to do this at a greater scale. AI can help automatically produce what political scientist Amy McKay has termed \u201cmicrolegislation<\/a>\u201c: loopholes that may be imperceptible to human readers on the page\u2014until their impact is realized in the real world.<\/p>\n

But AI can be constrained and directed to distribute power rather than concentrate it. For Emirati residents, the most intriguing possibility of the AI plan is the promise to introduce AI \u201cinteractive platforms\u201d where the public can provide input to legislation. In experiments across locales as diverse as\u00a0Kentucky<\/a>,\u00a0Massachusetts, France<\/a>,\u00a0Scotland<\/a>,\u00a0Taiwan<\/a>, and many others, civil society within democracies are innovating and experimenting with ways to leverage AI to help listen to constituents and construct public policy in a way that best serves diverse stakeholders.<\/p>\n

If the UAE is going to build an AI-native government, it should do so for the purpose of empowering people and not machines. AI has real potential to improve deliberation and pluralism in policymaking, and Emirati residents should hold their government accountable to delivering on this promise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n Bruce Schneier
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AI-Generated Law On April 14, Dubai\u2019s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum,\u00a0announced\u00a0that the United Arab Emirates would begin using\u00a0artificial intelligence\u00a0to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to \u201cregularly suggest updates\u201d to the law and \u201caccelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.\u201d AI would create a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167,57,624,268,1],"tags":[87],"class_list":["post-3993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-bruce-schneier","category-laws","category-llm","category-uncategorized","tag-bruce-schneier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serisec.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}