City officials in Brazil voted to pass bill that was secretly written by ChatGPT in just 15 seconds

After the law came into effect on November 23, a Porto Alegre councilman shared that the legislation was written by OpenAI’s chatbot

The AI-generated response was approved by all 36 members of the council, who did not know that it was AI-generated, The Washington Post reported

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Published: 4:13am, 5 Dec 2023

A bill about water meters that a Brazilian city council unanimously voted to pass in October was revealed to have been entirely written by ChatGPT, its sponsor disclosed last week in an X post.

The law came into effect on November 23. Six days later, Porto Alegre councilman Ramiro Rosario shared that the legislation was written by OpenAI’s chatbot, The Washington Post newspaper reported.

The councilman told The Washington Post that the bill was not the product of days of legislative brainstorming, but rather emerged after about 15 seconds from a ChatGPT command of some 250 characters.

The logo for OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Photo: AP

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, generates responses by predicting what comes next in a sentence, based on patterns it learned during training.

Rosario told The Post that the command he input into ChatGPT was: “Create a municipal law for the city of Porto Alegre, originating from the legislature and not the executive, which prohibits the Municipal Water and Sewage Department from charging the owner of the property for the payment of a new water meter when it is stolen.”

In response, ChatGPT responded with solutions that “astounded” Rosario, he told The Post, suggesting two innovative ideas for a problem that plagued his constituents for months.

He said the proposals were a 30-day deadline for the city to replace stolen water meters and a provision waiving water bills if the deadline was not met, according to The Post.