With UK AI regulation on the horizon, some minds will turn to how to effectively draft legislation.  Also considering that question is the UK government's Incubator for AI team (i.Ai), who have released an AI legislative drafting tool called ‘Lex’.

According to its website, it was in November 2023, the Deputy Prime Minister established the ‘Incubator for AI’ or ‘i.AI’, an elite team of highly empowered technical experts at the heart of government. Their mission is to help departments harness the potential of AI to improve lives and the delivery of public services. 

In the words of i.Ai on its blog :

Lex is dedicated to enhancing the drafting and navigation of legislation within the UK government. By leveraging advanced AI technologies, this project aims to assist legal drafters, making their work more productive and accessible.

i.Ai explain that Lex's features include:

  • semantic search - for example, of a phrase like "Tax regulations on people who've recently arrived in the UK from abroad".  According to i.AI, this helps locate contextually relevant legislative materials in a way that traditional search methods cannot do reliably. 
  • drafting explanatory notes using AI rather than, as present, manually.

To do this, i.Ai explain that development of Lex is the result of user insights into what they were trying to achieve and what they need. In the future, there will be additional user insights gathered from different parts of Civil Service who work with legislation.  Interestingly, the blog also nods to the user-friendly design of Lex, including use of filters, which emphasises that what is important is not simply what output is produced, but also how it is displayer to the user to incorporate into their analysis.

As to next steps for Lex, the blog says to ‘stay tuned’.  The work of i.AI looks set to continue with additional work between i.AI and government departments (see our previous update here). To see what else i.AI is doing, visit: Projects (ai.gov.uk). A notable one is a ‘consultation response tool that can read, summarise and triage the responses Government receives to the 700+ consultations that we initiate every year, saving up to £80m annually, and potentially freeing up time for us to undertake more engagement with the public on a broader range of issues.’ One may expect this to be useful when the government receives responses to its anticipated consultation on AI regulation in the UK.

If you would like to discuss how current or future regulations impact what you do with AI, please contact Tom Whittaker, Brian Wong, Lucy Pegler, David Varney, or Martin Cook. For the latest on AI law and regulation, see our blog and newsletter.