The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CT CBD shop owner’s new AI tool makes public testimony easier
A Connecticut CBD shop owner has developed an artificial intelligence tool to help likeminded 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.
“That’s certainly foreseeable, I think, depending on the volume,” he said. “Not something we’d be dealing with yet but, certainly, if you get so inundated with testimony that it’s impossible for individual staff members to handle it or read it or for legislators, who knows? At some point, there might be an algorithm set up to sort of select that representative testimony and just read those?”
At the moment, though, having an AI help write and submit testimony is not dissimilar to systems already in place.
“Obviously, if an organization was represented by a lobbyist, the lobbyists would take care of that, gather testimony and submit it on behalf of members of the association,” Looney said.
There have, Looney said, already been problems with written testimony, issues that might be magnified by AI: “Somebody may get a list of people that submit testimony and their names and they may or may not actually have reviewed the testimony or endorsed it. That’s always a risk, and we’ve had some of that already in the past.”
In that way, Looney said Bastian’s tool is nothing new.
“It’s a more high-tech way of doing something that has been done for a long time,” he said.
The state legislature is currently debating a proposal to govern some uses of AI, but Torres said he worries the general public, and state and federal legislators, don’t know enough about the technology to have a productive conversation.
“We’ve seen evidence of [that], just in the hearings over the past few years with social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg,” he said. “I don’t even think our Congress knows how to ask the right questions about data privacy. Those those hearings are almost comical in terms of the discourse going on, because there’s no clear understanding of its use.”