"We Want Good Enough:" The Transportation Department's Plan To Use AI For New Regs

If you're an American and you leave your house, you probably interface with something touched by the Department of Transportation (DOT). Cars, planes, and public transit all fall under the massive agency. The entire American alphabet soup of transit agencies is housed under the DOT, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). All of them, under the DOT, will be able to "use AI to draft rules," per a new investigation from ProPublica.

Google's Gemini is at the center of new DOT plans

The new regulations could have the potential to impact nearly every aspect of day-to-day life for Americans. The US DOT's general counsel, Gregory Zerzan, told agency leaders that it would be "the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules" using Google's Gemini AI model. The plan was presented as a demonstration of AI's "potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings," said agency attorney Daniel Cohen in a message to colleagues. Cohen said the AI would help DOT rule writers do their jobs "better and faster." DOT employees were also pitched on less work, and were told by a presenter that "Gemini can handle 80% to 90% of the work of writing regulations,"while employees could do the rest.

Faster is apparently the focus, with Zerzan stating, “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ. We want good enough. We’re flooding the zone.” It wants rules made fast, and the goal will eventually be for humans to simply monitor AI-to-AI interactions within the DOT. Zerzan envisions a DOT that circumvents an admittedly cumbersome regulatory process: one that can take an idea to a draft ready for review by the DOT's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in just 30 days. He believes it shouldn't take "more than 20 minutes" to get a "draft rule" from Gemini.

DOT staff voice concerns over AI mistakes

ProPublica reports that some at the DOT were alarmed by the push for AI-generated regulations: "Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standardstoa nascent technologynotorious for making mistakes?" The agency's rules are far-reaching, often touching critical aspects of American infrastructure, from the highways we drive on to the planes in the sky. Skeptics argue that Gemini shouldn't be trusted with such responsibility, given that the models aren't capable of reasoning like a human being can, and more importantly, frequently make errors.

However, the DOT's AI push is moving faster than its criticisms, and staffers told the outlet that an unpublished FAA rule was drafted with AI.