Porto Alegre city council enacts an ordinance drafted by ChatGPT

The city council of Porto Alegre, Brazil, voted unanimously in October 2023 to approve a municipal ordinance that its sponsor, councilman Ramiro Rosário, had asked ChatGPT to write in full. The measure, which barred the city from charging residents to replace water meters stolen by thieves, took effect on 23 November 2023 after none of the council’s other 35 members were told of its origin.

Rosário later told the Associated Press that he gave the chatbot a 49-word prompt and presented the resulting text without altering a word, only disclosing the AI authorship after the vote — in a social media post in which he said he was “convinced” AI represented a coming “technological revolution.” He said the proposal likely would not have been put to a vote had he revealed the method beforehand.

Council president Hamilton Sossmeier’s initial reaction was that the episode set a “dangerous precedent,” according to The Register, though he said after reviewing the ordinance more closely that he expected the practice to become routine. No jurisdiction disputed the ordinance’s validity once its authorship became public, and it remained in force.

The case, reported at the time as Brazil’s first AI-drafted legislation, was cited afterwards as an early instance of AI-generated text entering official processes faster than the scrutiny built around those processes — a pattern subsequently visible in court filings, regulatory comments and other government documents produced with generative tools.