ProPublica tells us that Lumberjack / Road Ruler Sean Duffy is looking to Fancy Autocomplete to draft rules and regulations:

“The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. ‘We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. ‘We want good enough.’”

And my life flashed before my eyes.

“The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Exciting doesn’t begin to cover it.

”[Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel] appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

And I will flood my seat.

All of this is concerning because the agency is in charge of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding, and to stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails.

What if it hallucinates as AI does?

“The presenter expressed little concern that the regulatory documents produced by AI could contain so-called hallucinations — erroneous text that is frequently generated by large language models such as Gemini — according to three people present. In any case, that’s where DOT’s staff would come in, he said. “It seemed like his vision of the future of rulemaking at DOT is that our jobs would be to proofread this machine product,” one employee said. “He was very excited.” (Attendees could not clearly recall the name of the lead presenter, but three said they believed it was Brian Brotsos, the agency’s acting chief AI officer. Brotsos declined to comment, referring questions to the DOT press office.)”“A spokesperson for the DOT did not respond to a request for comment; Cohen and Zerzan also did not respond to messages seeking comment. A Google spokesperson did not provide a comment.”

I bet. I bet their lawyers were making frantic throat-cutting gestures and grabbing the phones to hang-up.

Published with permission of Mock Paper Scissors