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- Members of Congress are starting to use AI in their daily lives.The most frequent use is for research and speechwriting.One senator said it's "impressively good at certain things and pretty miserable at some things."
In December, Rep. Thomas Massie used an analogy for foreign aid that was an instant hit among his libertarian and America-First Republican fans.
"US foreign aid spending is like watering the neighbor's yard while your house is on fire," the Kentucky Republican posted on X, adding a fire emoji. Fox News wrote an article about it, and two months later, the libertarian student group "Young Americans for Liberty" turned it into an Instagram post.
As it turns out, Massie didn't come up with the line himself. Grok did.
Massie told BI this month that he ripped the phrase from a speech he asked the xAI-developed chatbot to generate using his voice. He said he's done this more than once.
"Out of five paragraphs, I'll find one sentence that's good," Massie said. "But it makes it worth doing."
Leaning on AI for speechwriting is an apparently bipartisan affair on Capitol Hill. "I'll type in some phrases and say, can we make this more punchy?" Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California told BI, adding that he began using ChatGPT "almost like an editor" in the last year.
"There was some speech I gave where it edited in a couple of lines that people thought, 'Wow, that's really good,'" Khanna said.
Congress has developed a reputation for lagging behind the public when it comes to adopting new technology. Plenty of lawmakers told BI that they have yet to get into using AI, either because they're skeptical that it will be useful for them or they just haven't gotten around to it.
But several lawmakers have begun to casually adopt the technology, most often as a search engine and research tool. Khanna said he uses both ChatGPT and Grok, turning to the technology "two to three times per day." Massie, who uses Grok because of its convenient placement within the X app, said he uses the chatbot for "anything."
'Impressively good at certain things and pretty miserable at some things'
As Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has waged a fight to make deeper cuts to federal spending as part of the "Big Beautiful Bill," he's been consulting with Grok.
"I got up at 3 o'clock in the morning with an idea to use it," the Wisconsin Republican told BI in early June. He said the technology's been useful for running the numbers on the bill's impact on the deficit and to find documents that support his arguments. "It's really great at identifying sources without me having to crawl around in government forms."
In some ways, members of Congress are just doing what other Americans are doing. More and more people are using AI at work, according to a recent Gallup poll, with 40% of employees saying they use it a few times per year. Another 19% say they use it frequently, while 8% say they use it on a daily basis.
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Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a champion of a controversial provision in the "Big Beautiful Bill" that would restrict state's ability to regulate AI for 10 years, told BI that while he "would not claim to be a sophisticated AI user," he's been using ChatGPT as an "enhanced search engine."
Cruz said he recently asked an AI chatbot about his own record, when he "could not remember when I had first taken a public position" on a particular policy area.
"It gave a very thorough answer, going back to an interview I'd done in 2012 and a comment I'd made in 2014," Cruz said. "That research previously would have required some staff assistance, spending hours and hours, and you still wouldn't have found anything."
Large language models like ChatGPT and Grok are known to sometimes present false information as fact — known as "hallucinating." For Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, that's enough to discourage her from using it.
"It lies," Warren told BI. "I've tried using it, and it gets things wrong that I already know the answer to. So when I see that, I've lost all confidence."
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said he's tried ChatGPT and has been disappointed by its apparent limitations, even when carrying out more basic tasks.
In one instance, Murphy said he asked ChatGPT to generate a list of his Democratic colleagues ordered alphabetically by first name, only for it to include retired senators.
"It seems to be impressively good at certain things and pretty miserable at some things," Murphy said.
Even those who are otherwise fans of the technology said they're aware that they could be getting fed incorrect information.
"My chief of staff has astutely warned me that AI is often confidently wrong," Johnson said. "So you really have to be careful in how you phrase your questions."
"It definitely hallucinates on you," Massie said. "It told me there was a Total Wine and More in Ashland, Kentucky, and no such thing exists."
