AI agents draft new legal rules with limited creativity
Can AI agents make law? Evaluating AI legal relevance and creativity
Artificial IntelligenceComputers and SocietyMachine Learning
Summary
This study looks at whether AI can create new laws, especially for situations not seen before. The researchers had AI models role-play as different people debating to write a constitution for AI itself. The AI was good at mixing existing legal ideas and some AI-specific terms but didn't fully show original creative thinking about new situations. The authors found AI can help suggest new legal ideas but still relies on human reasoning.
What this means in practice
- •For legal technology developers: Develop tools that assist with drafting legal documents by combining existing laws and AI-specific vocabulary.
- •For policy advisors: Generate new policy options for emerging AI governance scenarios by extending existing legal frameworks.
Authors
Benjamin Ricaud, Artem Galushko
Abstract
Large language models, the artificial intelligence (AI) systems behind modern chatbots, are trained on vast amounts of legal text, but can they build on it to write law for situations that text never anticipated? In this study, we analyse AI agents' ability to draft a hypothetical "Constitution" for a "community of AI agents". We design "constitutional assemblies" in which a single language model plays several characters that debate to produce a draft constitution. We find that the assemblies converge on a robust floor of legal provisions, and generate a wide variety of different proposals around it, including several AI-specific provisions with no equivalent in human law. Looking more closely at the "creativity" of these AI agents, we find different levels: most proposals combine existing concepts and themes from human constitutions with AI-specific vocabulary. We introduce a measure of this recombination, which helps identify and highlight the most novel legal material. This study reveals a ceiling on AI creativity: the agents extend familiar legal ideas to new situations, but they do not work through what those situations would change. Although current AI models can help develop new laws, they still depend on human legal reasoning.