BISMARCK — The North Dakota Legislature is training on an AI tool that could be deployed in the 2027 session to save lawmakers time.
The Legislative Council is a nonpartisan body that supports state legislators.
The goal of the AI tool is to draft a summary of the bill’s content at the end of the session. This is currently done manually by the Legislative Council’s legal team for the approximately 600 bills passed each session, but it ultimately involves drafting summaries of bills and amendments to bills proposed during the session.
“If we can actually train this to consistently produce accurate results that can be quickly checked and verified, we have the potential to save a ton of time. That’s a ton of time,” said Legislative Council Legal Director Emily Thompson.
Thompson said it would take “easily” 100 hours just to review the title summaries prepared by his staff after the legislative session.
Congressional AI tools are different from common AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. While these chatbots are trained on large publicly available webpages and datasets, the Legislative Assembly’s AI tools are trained using only North Dakota bill summaries previously created for the 2019, 2021 and 2023 legislative sessions, said Information Technology Director Cody Malloy.
This decision was made to ensure that the AI tool produces work that mimics the style and quality of the agency’s work.
The Legislative Council chose to use Meta’s Llama 3.2 1b Instruct model as the basis for the tool, which was trained using the AI training program Unsloth.
Malloy told the Tribune that the first generation of AI tools had some difficulty producing satisfactory results, but after continuing to train the model, he feels the outline is ready for review. The tool created three versions of title summaries for every bill passed in the 2025 Congress. The next step is to have the Legislative Council’s legal department compare the AI-generated summary with the summary created for the 2025 legislative session.
“What we’re trying to do is do a pretty thorough review of, ‘What did the humans draft? What did later versions of this tool come out with, and how close did they come?'” Thompson said. “Then we keep working on our training because we don’t want to publish something that isn’t accurate.”
Malloy said AI tools only serve as a starting point.
“What almost every state is working on is making sure there is always a human involved, and ensuring that it’s not just pulling and publishing a bunch of documents from an AI,” he said. “Humans always review, edit, and make the final decision on whether something is published or submitted.”
Term limits and institutional knowledge
According to House Minority Leader Mike LeFaux (R-Dickinson), the recent implementation of term limits leaves Congress with a huge amount of institutional knowledge to lose. Those who have seen decades of change on important topics will no longer be able to provide insight or context on issues.
Thompson said he hopes fully functional AI tools can alleviate some of the knowledge loss.
“If you have a tool that can accurately summarize bills and summarize amendments, I think that would be extremely valuable, especially in this climate where we have term limits and we have new members coming in all the time,” Thompson said. “Someone who has been in Congress for 25 years and knows the ins and outs of how education funding works will no longer be able to do that anymore. Term limits mean that legislators have shorter terms, and they can write bills and amendments quickly, accurately, and easily. If I were a legislator, that would be very helpful.”
Lefort said there are pros and cons to implementing AI, but he trusts Legislative Council staff to deploy the tool responsibly. He said it would be foolish not to implement tools that can save time and effort, but that lawmakers and government officials should be careful not to rely too heavily on AI.
Other changes to be submitted to the Legislative Council
AI tools are not the only changes coming to the Legislative Council. Commissioner John Bjornson told the Tribune that the agency is preparing to implement a new bill drafting system that will make it easier for lawmakers to write bills and faster for City Council staff.
“We’ve built a lot of tools into it that help us deal with late-night revisions and things like that,” he said. “We’re not only relying on AI on that front, but also on modern systems that incorporate more tools.”
Tanner Ecker / Bismarck Tribune
The update will make it easier for lawmakers to request amendments or drafts of bills from the Legislative Council, and modernize the word processor the agency uses to draft bills.
The agency is also developing an internal tool with the same user interface as a typical AI chatbot. This tool allows users to enter prompts and receive answers extracted from available data. However, this tool only extracts data on the Legislative Council website to ensure accuracy. Malloy said this is a long way from being released to the public.
Another change is the ability to download videos from the council’s website. All legislative committee meetings are recorded and posted on ndlegis.gov. However, until now the Legislative Council had not approved the downloading of videos from the site. Malloy said he recently received approval and is in the process of implementing the ability to download videos for the public.
