San Francisco wants to use AI to save itself from bureaucracy
San Francisco's municipal code runs about the same length as the entire U.S. federal rulebook — that's 75 "Moby Dick"s and counting. No lawyer, or even a team of them, could ever muck out all the redundant and outdated sections contained in it. So City Attorney David Chiu, a former state assemblymember and city supervisor, is calling in Stanford's AI experts to help him out.
And he hopes others in government will follow him.
A team from Stanford's Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab trained an AI program to chew over a city's legal code in search of every instance in which a city department is mandated to produce a report. Then Chiu's team went to those departments to see which reports could be tweaked for efficiency, combined with similar requirements, or slashed altogether.
'This tool saved us countless hours of work," Chiu said. 'Because of the length of our code … it's likely a project we would never have undertaken.'
Now Chiu is sponsoring city legislation that would change more than a third of the nearly 500 reporting requirements that can be altered by a city ordinance. Chiu wants to do away with 140 of them entirely.
'This isn't just a San Francisco problem,' Chiu said, referencing a report that described the millions of pages produced by Congress every year as a black hole. 'We need to be delivering results and services, not just churning out more reports,' he said. 'Particularly in this era of budget scarcity we need to get up staff time to focus on the truly pressing issues of the day.'
Stanford professor and HAI Senior Fellow Daniel Ho, who leads the team behind the AI endeavor, said to tackle those reams of legalese, his team trained an AI model to essentially think like a lawyer to find and parse the required reports.
One requirement still on the books that Chiu and Ho pointed to requires the city's Public Works Department to issue a biennial report on the city's fixed newspaper racks. The problem is those don't exist anymore.
Chiu said that while hundreds of similarly obsolete reports were required of departments across the city government, the controller, city administrator, planning department and the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development were particularly backed up with what Ho dubbed 'policy sludge.'
Chiu will see his legislation introduced at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors next week. While city rules prohibit supervisors from co-sponsoring legislation brought by another city department, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said in a statement that City Hall has been weighted down by unnecessary code for too long. 'This legislation will cut through that clutter, freeing up staff time so departments can focus on what matters most—serving San Franciscans.'
Ho said his team calibrated and tested the tool before running the city search, trolling through the U.S. legal code and successfully turning up 1,400 known reports, along with hundreds more.
It's the first time he said the tool has been used in this way, although last year his lab trained an AI tool to identify racial restrictions in millions of property records.
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