Equity and Governance for Artificial Intelligence

Short Assignment

Legislative Recommendation Assignment

Assignment Overview

You will write two legislative recommendations for actual AI regulation bills under consideration in Congress or state legislatures. These approximately 3-page documents will be written from the point of view of a legislative policy staffer advising their member of Congress or state legislator on what action the member should take on the legislation (e.g., co-sponsor, oppose), taking into account both global good and specific constituent considerations for that member. The documents will follow a tightly prescribed template for summarizing, doing stakeholder analysis, and making a recommendation, mimicking the conditions for writing in a legislative office setting. The document should be written for a non-technical audience (legislator), but draw on ways of understanding evidence that reflect a STEM perspective and understandings of technological feasibility that reflect computer science subject matter expertise.

Assignment Deliverables

Approximately 3-page document, fitted to desired template. Each legislative recommendation will go through a first draft, rapid feedback, and final draft. The timelines for these steps will simulate the fast pace of a legislative office when the legislative body is in session.

Scenario

Welcome to your first day on the job as an AI policy staffer in the U.S. Congress! You work for one specific member of Congress, and provide informed, wise advice that shapes their actions in the space of data and AI. This is an exciting and rewarding opportunity to impact the course of the future on this emerging technology, in the nation at the forefront of its development! Congressional staff jobs are famously fast-paced with quick turnaround deadlines, and your new job is no exception.

As your first task, you've been assigned to study a newly introduced bill and make a formal recommendation to the member of Congress you work for about whether they should join the bill as an official co-sponsor, stay neutral, or publicly oppose the bill. You have 7 days to complete this task the first time, but watch out, you'll have less time in the future!

Additional Details

The instructor provides students with a specific AI-related bill to review, along with similar and related bills they may want to read for comparison. Students choose a specific member of Congress to work for (other than the bill's authors). The instructor also provides a legislative recommendation template with detailed instructions and an example of a completed template.

Honor Code and use of External Resources:

My goal for this assignment is to give you an authentic Congressional staff experience. Congressional staff are held to extremely high standards of integrity, excellence, and discretion. You should feel responsible for the accuracy of every detail of the work that you put in front of a sitting member of Congress. We will hold you to the same high standards. Congressional staff also know how to make use of available resources to get their work done on the blisteringly quick turnaround deadlines they deal with every day. These include extensive, fluent use of Google, Congress.gov, Wikipedia, and other websites; conversations with knowledgeable people; and—in many but not all Congressional offices—use generative AI for summarizing huge volumes of reading and for editing written work.

As an AI policy class, we also feel it is important that you have firsthand experience with the capabilities and limitations of AI technology as it applies to day-to-day work tasks. As such, we will greenlight you using those same resources in those ways on this assignment. You must disclose such use at the bottom of your Leg Rec. This is just so we have a sense of how folks are using these tools. We ask that you don't use them to wholesale skip doing the work—after all, you're supposed to be learning things in this class. Below are some important things we expect you to learn during the leg rec assignment. You should use your own self-discipline and discretion in your tool use to ensure you are still making progress towards learning these skills:

• How to read and interpret the (sometimes difficult and opaque) language of the actual full text of laws.
• How to summarize detailed content in a concise but accurate and complete way.
• How to write about AI topics for a nontechnical audience.
• How to put yourself in the shoes of a particular member of Congress and understand what their views of a given law would be or should be.
• How to anticipate the reactions of different stakeholders to a piece of legislation.
• How to formulate both the best arguments and counter-arguments about a piece of legislation, for different audiences.
• How to anticipate negative side-effects of legislation.