Among the three draft issue memoranda the Legislative Research Council presented to the Legislative Executive Board Wednesday is a research brief on “Artificial Intelligence in Government”. Two sentences in that brief tell us why artificial intelligence should not be in government:
A Stanford University study found that general-purpose chatbots hallucinated “between fifty-eight and eighty-two percent of the time on legal queries.” Researchers at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence found that even custom AI legal tools made for specific purposes, like those developed by Westlaw and Lexis Nexis for legal research, still hallucinated more than thirty-four percent and seventeen percent of the time, respectively [link added; Legislative Research Council, Draft Issue Memorandum: “Artificial Intelligence in Government,” presented to Legislative Executive Board 2026.08.26, p. 2].
If you did your job wrong 17%, 34%, 58%, or 82% of the time, you’d lose your job. If you’re a legislator using chatbots to get information about laws and to write the speeches you make about laws you are voting on, you’re giving your colleagues and constituents lots of bogus information. If you’re a public servant in any agency using artificial intelligence to give citizens information about the requirements of federal, state, and local law, you’re giving your fellow Americans lots of bad guidance.
If I told you that of the 98 sources that I linked in the 14 blog posts I published over the last five days, I made up 82, or 58, or 33, or 16, or even one, I would lose all credibility, and deservedly so.
An “intelligence” that hallucinates every day is kinda dumb, and certainly dumber than anyone/anything I want helping me understand, compose, and implement law and policy.
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The Legislative Research Council does not call for electing a robot Governor or putting the LRC on chatbot-pilot. This issue memo points to a new Generative AI Policy posted by the South Dakota Bureau of Human Resources that recognizes concerns about accuracy along with security, privacy, and intellectual property and puts a hard clamp on the use of generative AI in government work by state employees, executive board and commission members, contractors, vendors, and volunteers. Crucially:
GenAI-created content must be considered as a starting point. The content must be reviewed for accuracy, clarity, spelling, proper grammar, and contextual appropriateness before relying on it for work purposes. GenAI-created content is not a replacement for a User’s professional judgment and creativity [Bureau of Human Resources, “Statewide Policies: Generative AI Policy,” retrieved 2026.08.29].
LRC notes that individuals subject to this policy may use AI in government work “only after obtaining approval from the individual’s agency leadership.”
This draft issue memorandum provides examples of how other states have tried to put guardrails around the use of this inherently unreliable tool:
- Nevada outlaws the use of AI in “administering care” by school counselors, school psychologists, and school social workers. Nevada also requires that “a natural person—not artificial intelligence—makes final decisions in emergency response planning and resource allocation.” (I have to ask: why limit those restrictions to school care-giving and emergency response? Shouldn’t actual people make every decision in government of the people, by the people, and for the people?)
- North Dakota prohibits law enforcement from deploying robots that can fire lethal weapons autonomously (North Dakota cops have to do their own shooting and killing.)
- Montana’s governmental entities and state officers can’t use AI “for the cognitive behavioral manipulation of a person or group” (but Facebook still can!), to classify people in ways that lead to discrimination, or for malicious or surveillance purposes.
- Utah requires cops to tag AI-generated reports as AI products and certify that they have read and reviewed those products for accuracy (and again, shouldn’t this declare-and-review requirement apply to everyone, public and private sector, posting bot-barf instead of genuine human output?)
The issue memo’s summary of states’ cautious restrictions on AI use contrasts markedly with its summary of federal action. LRC focuses on the Trump Administration’s July 2025 America’s AI Action Plan, which in LRC’s telling seems to be all about building and using more AI everywhere all the time and not at all about limiting the influence of inherently hallucinating bots, algorithms, and the corporations that build and control them.
This draft issue memo concludes by telling legislators that they “will be challenged to ensure that statutory and regulatory efforts will keep pace with, and appropriately address, the rapid advances in this technology.” But the core message legislators and other public servants need to take from LRC’s AI brief lies in the statement of how often AI screws up and that no amount of rapid advances will remove those screw-ups from this technology:
The most serious problem plaguing every LLM is the tendency to hallucinate. An LLM is said to have hallucinated when it gives a user information that is factually incorrect or implausible. Because of the way LLMs work and the math involved, hallucinations are an inevitability: “Numerous studies have demonstrated that hallucinations are an inherent characteristic of LLMs” [link added to LRC cited source; LRC, 2026.08.26, p. 2].
AI hallucinates. AI will always hallucinate. Legislators, your job is not to push for more hallucinatory technology in government. Your job is to limit the effects that inherently malfunctioning technology has on government functions and the people you serve.
We don’t know, Mr. H, what the spawn of the spawn of the AI will bring, and it might be crystal clear unhallucinatory future of AI overlords. grudznick rues that day, when my granddaughter’s grandaughter lives under machine control in a hyper-cyber bot-net world
In the meantime, you yourownself have no idea just how much the minions at the Council of Research for the Legislatures is already hallucinating when they write these papers, probably using the Grok.
I thought we’d use AI if we wanted to hallucinate? Don’t tell me its going to take the joy out of life too. It can’t enjoy a drink can it? Watch the sunset and feel anything?
Apparently it already has us sex wise as call girls or rentboys. Of course they can switch sex in an instant. So, what drives them eventually to do anything.
I watched Richard Dawkins talk about how good his philosophical talk with AI was about his new book and was surprised. Although he was a it off on gender issues, so traditionalist. He established criteria that is easily disproved, but that’s for another time.
What in the heck are you writing there, Mr. Anderson? grudznick does not fallow who Mr. Dakins and the rentboys are. If the rentboys are a new kind of AI, when they can start weilding torches can you even imagine the kind of “art” they will create? The mass production by AI of paintings and little statues and napkin holders and branding irons is going to put a lot of human artists out of the business. There will be no more punk rockers, no more rappers, no more spoken word artists, because the AI can not only create it better but can deliver it better. The AI is coming for all who still turn a dime.
Out of Context, But : I knew a guy in Vermillion that hallucinated every day. For a while, anyway. He invented AI, grudzie.
Well Grudz’ you are correct, with AI anyone can make a painting that’s a masterpiece or just an abject failure. We shall see. Not much different than before.
The problem is that AI can learn the processes a human takes years to develop. Soooo, who’s going to put in the grind if you don’t have too.
When I first started teaching I saw a show of a designer\illustrator that was amazing.
At the time I realized that 90% of what that man did was already replaced by computers. Its still happening. Nobody knows the end result but you can’t stop technology.
We are being admonished to invest more in AI to keep it from killing us.
I really do not like the term “ hallucinate“ used in this way in this context. More accurately, the AI misinformed or passed on inaccurate information. This puts the focus back on the data fed to this monstrosity of linguistic probability; these machines are getting bad data, and like the MAGA faithful, pass those inaccuracies along as truth – a good sign that this level of AI is not thinking (and incapable of hallucinating).
Media literacy and critical evaluation may well be the most important tools for people in this time. But those take work and time – the very burdens automation seeks to relieve us of.