This week the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration convened an unusually well-attended hearing with a panel of government technology leaders from an alphabet soup of congressional agencies, including the Library of Congress (LOC), Government Publishing Office (GPO), Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the House Chief Administrative Office (CAO). The purpose of this gathering of the acronyms: to discuss how AI could make Congress govern more effectively.
Congress has been cautious in its adoption of AI compared to the governments of India, Italy, and Brazil, all of whom are turning to AI to transcribe and translate parliamentary proceedings and for sophisticated legislative record searching. Still, that’s not to say the U.S. has been totally complacent when it comes to AI adoption in the legislature: Last April, the House doled out 40 ChatGPT licenses (the only approved large language model for use on official devices) to a group of bipartisan staff and set up an AI Working Group to discuss how AI can help staff in their day-to-day work.
