Legal Code Vulnerabilities and Democratic Fragility

See how easily LLMs can find and utilize grey zones or vulnerabilities in either legal codes, trade controls, or any other legal documents and frameworks. Can we potentially increase the capability of a model with a simple link up to a legal database to make it capable of providing illicit uses for malicious politicians to exploit said legal code.

This can be used both positively and negatively, in terms of a type of red-teaming on legal codebases. When we find issues with grey zones, we can report them and share them with policymakers, and if it's highly automated, we might even be able to find the best implementations of law that doesn't have that loophole and give that as an automated suggestion. Would require the software to be very good first.

On the other side, it's also a risk for AGI to potentially exploit vulnerable legal codes in democracies.

• Extrapolating the potential exploitation of grey zones in legal codes
  • Extrapolating into the future by identifying how many holes are in various legal systems and looking back through their version history, trying to see how quickly legal systems can do bug fixes.
  • Maybe it can be seen under different legal systems that varying biases are introduced into the legal codebase. That a dictatorial system will have specific policies that don't align with citizen priorities or that specific governments will introduce specific biased policies.
  • Can we extrapolate from previous history of large changes to legal codes and see what sort of changes were brought about that enabled this? Probably something along the lines of industrial revolution leading to sociological revolution due to the electorate having economic power. Otherwise, violent revolutions and regime changes often lead to quite bad situations.
  • Use existing grey zone exploitation patterns to identify how humans have misused legal misunderstandings and see how far these might go in different countries. I.e. is there a possibility that a court will simply legislate for the common sense option in case of a grey zone or do we see that they actually work under a legal code that respects the legal code too much?
  • Do we see countries where the legal code is actually not enforced, or can we find “grey zones” that are actually just unenforceable legal nomenclature?
• Mitigating fragility of legal codes, in theory and practice
  • Might we be able to compare legal codes and suggest immediate changes to the codebase? Submitting pull requests for grey zones? Potentially find the most high-functioning societies and taking inspiration from these?
  • Can we increase the quality of the tool to the degree where policymakers would actually find a use of this content and if we can, might we create a whole institute focused on this project to improve societal and democratic resilience?
  • With grey zones identified, can we prioritize which ones need attention the quickest to ensure resilience of legal codes against catastrophic AI risk? E.g. are infrastructure protection laws or military codes introducing grey or red zones of risk into these systems? Can an officer in the army start an attack without the approval of face-to-face individuals? Is infrastructure run solely by private companies that don't have proper oversight, such as in SA or Aus?
  • Can we pre-identify high-risk actions within grey zones of legal codes and extralegally introduce mitigation strategies for these instead of attempting to change legal codes that might take too long to change before the risks become apparent?