LEGISLaiTOR: A tool for jailbreaking the legislative process
Willie Chalmers III, Margaret Belford · Team Managed Democracy
Submitted to AI and Democracy Hackathon: Demonstrating the Risks. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.
In this work, we consider the ramifications on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the legislative process in democratic governments. While other research focuses on the micro-level details associated with specific models, this project takes a macro-level approach to understanding how AI can assist the legislative process.
Reviews
Love the concept of Trojan Microlegislation and an obvious path for malicious use of AI or rogue AGI to inject long-term changes to society without politicians knowing this with a great example in Robert Moses. The example tool unfortunately wasn't live during the review process but it looks like a great demonstration to uncover some of these risks in-action. For continuing the work, a few ideas could be to integrate this into how prompt injection works in current technical systems, how more previous examples have looked, and developing the legislative defenses for this in a context that can be used across the US. From an AI safety perspective, this is also where it's relevant to figure out which sorts of laws we want to look out for, somewhat similar to spot-checking codebases for suspicious API requests if an AI has created it (esbenkc/karnak) or something similar.
Cool project! Unfortunately, the demo doesn’t seem to be working at this moment. That’s a shame, because based on the description it seems really cool.
I think the trojan microregulation is an interesting and realistic treat scenario that is very underexplored at the moment. If you can get an LLM to do this well, I think this project has great potential to be turned into a paper!
Impressive and engaging writeup! Investigating potential uses of AI in the legislation creation process seems very timely, I imagine there’s already hundreds of low-level staffers injecting delve-ridden texts into bills all over the US. Both the process and the democratic system itself will have to adjust to mitigate the risks. A direction in which this work could be extended is trying to see how real human beings interact with {malicious-,benign-}{AI,human} produced legislation.
Sadly, I could access neither the deployed app nor the sources.
Cite this project
@misc{iii2024legislaitor,
title = {{LEGISLaiTOR: A tool for jailbreaking the legislative process}},
author = {Willie Chalmers III and Margaret Belford},
year = {2024},
month = may,
note = {Submitted to AI and Democracy Hackathon: Demonstrating the Risks, an Apart Research Sprint},
howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/legislaitor-a-tool-for-jailbreaking-the-legislative-process}},
url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/legislaitor-a-tool-for-jailbreaking-the-legislative-process}
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