“Parliament has not been immune to AI slop and misleading AI-generated content,” said Brando Benifei, the Socialists and Democrats lawmaker who led Parliament’s work on the AI Act, the EU’s landmark law governing the technology. “MEPs must lead by example as the AI Act’s transparency rules become applicable.”
The project captures the dilemma facing Parliament as generative AI becomes embedded in its daily work. Around 2,100 people use AI daily in the Parliament — around 20 percent of all staff.
Its leaders want officials to stop feeding parliamentary material into uncontrolled public platforms, but they are also concerned that the technology is degrading the quality of legislative work and introducing errors or misleading content into the democratic process. Their suspicions that lawmakers and assistants are already relying on AI have been fueled by a surge in amendments requiring translation, telltale drafting styles and occasional hallucinated references to laws that do not exist.
Committee chairs asked Parliament Secretary-General Alessandro Chiocchetti to draw up guidelines for lawmakers’ use of AI. He replied that the matter might instead fall to the Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, which would need to amend the institution’s rules of procedure to introduce stricter rules.
MEPs are currently under no obligation to disclose whether amendments, questions or other parliamentary work were produced with the help of artificial intelligence.
Irish Renew lawmaker Barry Andrews, who chairs the Parliament’s development committee, said it was already clear that some MEPs were using AI to draft parliamentary questions, speeches and amendments.