A Connecticut CBD shop owner has developed an artificial intelligence tool to help like-minded residents submit official testimony to the state legislature.
The tool will, Kenneth Bastian explained, produce written testimony with a minimum of input, and provide a link and assistance in submitting it. A separate tool will produce emails that can be sent to local representatives.
“It’s a brave new world,” said state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven. “That can be either something that helps facilitate communication by the public, or obviously it’s something that’s subject to misuse as well.”
Every time a bill is proposed in the state legislature, there is an opportunity for both written and verbal public testimony.
Last week, when the state legislature opened a rather sweeping cannabis bill up for public testimony, there were 154 written submissions.
Some of that testimony, perhaps one-third of those submissions, were generated by an artificial intelligence tool, similar to Chat GPT, developed by Kenneth Bastian.
Bastian owns Branford-based CT Hemp Shop, but, “AI web tools is my other hat,” he said.
He’s actually developed a few AI tools related to cannabis, but as a CBD shop owner and founding member of the Cannabis Small Business Alliance, Bastian wanted to testify against a bill he believes will hurt Connecticut’s CBD and hemp community, and to “unify and unite all the businesses that are currently affected by the draconian laws that are currently being imposed on us.”
“I developed two different tools to allow people to write testimonies, and then submit them to their legislators,” he said. “A person just inserts their name and maybe two or three sentences of what they really want to say, or they can even insert 10 pages of information if they want to. But it really streamlines the process for people. Sometimes they have trouble with the words they want to express, so it definitely helped them with that, and I think we had a pretty epic output as far as written testimony goes.”
As of last week, he logged a total of 146 uses of those specific tools, but Bastian believes there were “definitely over over 50” pieces of testimony that actually were submitted with the functionality he developed.
“I know it’s definitely a lot,” he said. Every piece of submitted testimony would contain the words “Cannabis Small Business Alliance,” and while a fellow Alliance founder did go through the effort of counting the number of testimony submissions with that phrase, it might have been removed by users so it’s not known precisely how many pieces of testimony were submitted using the tool.
When asked if such a tool would reduce the power of legislative testimony, if it would reduce the value of every individual’s words, but he said no, quite the opposite.
“I would say it empowers the individual rather than takes away power, because most of the time people don’t really know what to say or how to express it, or sometimes they write rash, really, un-thought-out words,” he said. “I fully believe that it helped rather than took away from anything. If someone wants to write it themselves and not use AI, that’s completely up to them. However, it’s a tool for people that need assistance.”
JT Torres said that he, like Bastian, believes AI could be used to “democratize” tasks like writing legislative testimony.
“Because that’s a skill set, right? It’s a skill set, and it’s also a profession to know how to navigate those systems, know what words to use, the form, how to set it up,” he said. “If people are being excluded because of not having a skill set, then I could totally see that as a democratization of an industry that really needs it.”
Torres is a professor at Quinnipiac University, primarily focused on education, but he’s also been thinking about and studying artificial intelligence and how it might change the world in which we live.
He said the real concern might not be having an AI write testimony but having AI read it, and perhaps make decisions about that testimony.
“I do think there will be some kind of AI reader and so the terrifying thought, there’s the dystopia, legal testimonies will be written by AI and read by AI,” he said. “My question is always going to be, where is the human involvement in that cycle? We just have to make sure we don’t create that, where AI is just talking to AI.”
Looney said that’s entirely possible.
H/T: https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/
Click here to read the full article.
