JUS | Pilot project on the AI Act: Austria’s first fully AI-generated legal publication
Pilot project on the AI Act: Austria’s first fully AI-generated legal publication demonstrates the potential and future of generative specialised text AI
The 600-page work on the AI Regulation combines AI-supported text creation, legal expertise and automated formatting to create a precise and comprehensible publication.
Artificial intelligence is not only changing the way texts are created and edited. It is also changing the framework conditions for academic publishing. With the new research project “Smart.Recht. AI regulation simply explained”, the possibilities and limits of generative artificial intelligence in analysing, structuring and editing legal content are demonstrated. At the centre of the project is a 600-page publication on the EU AI Regulation (AI Act), which was created entirely with generative AI for the first time. The idea came from Prof Dr Wolfgang Zankl, Director of the Institute for Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence at SFU Vienna | Berlin, who is also leading the project. It is supported and published by the legal publishing house MANZ. The aim is to make the complex requirements of the AI Regulation accessible to non-specialist lawyers and interested readers, thereby contributing to the democratisation of the law.
The publication serves as a concrete case study for a series of fundamental questions such as
- How will legal works be created in the future?
- What is the role of a specialised publisher in an increasingly automated world?
- Can texts created with generative AI be relevant under copyright law?
AI regulation presented clearly and precisely
The European Union’s AI Regulation marks a milestone in European regulation and, with its complexity, also brings new challenges for lawyers, companies and authorities. This publication takes a different approach to a traditional commentary and focuses more on general ease of understanding than on a complete analysis of sources.
AI in use for legal publications
Generative AI was used specifically for the first time in the creation of the publication, guided by a structured and jurisprudence-based master prompt. If this did not produce usable results, no manual reworking was carried out, but clarity was created through reprompts. The programme (ChatGPT) was only provided with the text of the regulation, the legislative recitals and the guidelines of the EU Commission. External literature and case law were excluded in order to ensure an independent, true-to-source interpretation and to largely rule out hallucination. The results were then automatically formatted and subjected to a legal plausibility check: around 95 per cent of the texts were directly usable. This resulted in a clearly structured publication that is based on legally precise methodology and at the same time remains understandable for a wider readership – a combined approach of
AI-supported text creation, legal expertise and automated formatting.
The role of authors and publishers in the future
The project deliberately sees itself as a scientific experiment that also shows that and how AI-generated texts can also be relevant in terms of copyright if there is qualified creative influence. “For a specialised publisher, the question is not whether AI will change publishing, but how we actively shape this change. Anyone who publishes legal knowledge must understand how it will be created in the future. Authors contribute experience, specialist knowledge and academic diligence and remain authorities of legal expertise. Specialist publishers bundle expertise, ensure quality and place knowledge in a reliable context,” says Peter Guggenberger, Managing Director of MANZ.
The project also opens up new insights into the use of AI in law from an academic perspective: “With AI, we have succeeded in writing an easy-to-understand explanation of the complicated Artificial Intelligence Act with numerous examples,” adds Zankl. In the forewords to the publication, Harald Leitenmüller, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Austria, and Klaus Steinmaurer, Managing Director of the Telecommunications and Postal Services Division of Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH, also emphasise the legal and democratic significance of communicating complex legal topics in a way that is understandable to the general public.
The results of the project provide impetus for the discussion on how to deal with AI-generated content in law and in academic publishing.
The publication can be downloaded free of charge at the following link: manz.at/smart.recht.
