In what can only be described as the boldest move since Elon Musk decided Twitter needed fewer employees and more chaos, the United Arab Emirates has announced plans to let artificial intelligence draft and monitor its laws. Because if there’s one thing better than human lawmakers who don’t read legislation before voting on it, it’s an AI that hallucinates facts while writing the legislation in the first place.
The Bold New Vision: Let The Machines Do The Thinking
The UAE Cabinet, led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has approved the creation of a new AI-powered “Regulatory Intelligence Office” designed to accelerate the legislative process by a staggering 70%.1 Officials claim this revolutionary system will track the daily impact of laws on people and the economy in real-time, suggesting updates informed by data.2 It’s almost as if someone watched “Minority Report” and thought, “Yes, but what if we applied pre-crime technology to legislation instead?”
“This new legislative system, powered by artificial intelligence, will change how we create laws, making the process faster and more precise,” Sheikh Mohammed announced in what may be the most optimistic statement since the captain of the Titanic said, “This ship is unsinkable.”3
UAE officials are particularly excited about the AI system’s ability to develop a centralized map of all national legislation, connecting federal and local laws with judicial rulings, executive procedures, and public services. Because nothing says “efficient governance” like letting an AI that struggles to consistently identify how many eyes a horse has determine the legal framework for a nation of 10 million people.
Trump’s AI Tariff Fiasco: A Cautionary Tale They’re Cheerfully Ignoring
Before the UAE gets too excited about its digital legal revolution, perhaps they should glance across the ocean at the smoldering economic crater formerly known as the US stock market. President Trump’s recent tariff announcements—which bear uncanny hallmarks of being written by AI—have wiped out approximately $2.5 trillion from the US stock market in what analysts are calling “the largest tax increase since 1968.“
Analysis of Trump’s reciprocal tariff structure revealed a simplistic formula that divides trade deficits by import values—exactly the kind of “solution” an AI would generate when asked for a straightforward way to balance trade.4 When crypto trader Jordan “Cobie” Fish asked ChatGPT for a simple method to ensure fair trade balances, the AI produced almost the exact formula implemented by Trump. Wojtek Kopczuk, editor of the Journal of Public Economics, remarked that the tariff structure was “exactly what the least informed student in the class would do, without revisions.”
The resulting economic bloodbath saw the S&P 500 experience its most significant four-day decline since its inception in the 1950s. The “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks alone lost over $2 trillion in value. But hey, why let a little thing like “catastrophic economic consequences” get in the way of progress?
Arabic + AI = What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
If hallucinating in English were an Olympic sport, large language models would bring home the gold every time. Now imagine these same systems trying to navigate the linguistic labyrinth of Arabic—a language so complex it makes English look like a toddler’s picture book.
Dr. Fatima Al-Wahhabi, a renowned linguist at the Institute for Linguistic Sanity, explains: “Arabic poses unique challenges that would make any AI system question its electronic existence. With 30 distinct dialects spread across 20 countries, a single word can have dozens of meanings depending on context and regional usage. Even humans struggle with this complexity.”
Indeed, a recent study found that 25% of sentences generated by leading LLMs in Arabic were factually incorrect.5 Arabic’s rich morphology means a complete part-of-speech tag set has over 300,000 tags (compared to English’s approximately 50), and Arabic words have 12 morphological analyses on average (English has 1.25 POS tags per word).6 But sure, let’s put this technology in charge of drafting laws. What’s the worst that could happen? A constitutional amendment that accidentally outlaws hummus?
“The phenomenon of diglossia, where there’s a gap between the formal written language and spoken dialects, complicates the development of effective NLP systems,” notes Dr. Al-Wahhabi.7 “It’s like asking an AI that learned English from Shakespeare to understand a conversation between two Glaswegian pub-goers discussing football.”
Inside the UAE’s AI Legal Lab: A Peek Into the Future
In an exclusive, TechOnion gained access to the UAE’s AI Legal Laboratory, where the future of legislative AI is being developed.
“Our system is perfect,” insists Khalid Al-Binari, Chief Optimism Officer at the UAE Ministry of Technological Infallibility, a department that definitely exists. “We’ve tested it extensively by having it revise traffic laws. It suggested implementing a ‘red means go, green means stop’ system because it analyzed global accident data and concluded humans have become too complacent with traditional colors.”
When pressed about concerns regarding AI hallucinations, Al-Binari waves dismissively. “Hallucinations are just alternative facts. Besides, our system has a special ‘reality check’ module that ensures 60% factual accuracy, which is 30% better than most human politicians.”
Lead engineer Aisha Al-Qahtani demonstrates the system by prompting it to draft a law on cryptocurrency regulation. The AI instantly generates a comprehensive 50-page document that includes provisions for regulating “blockchain-enabled quantum toasters” and requires all crypto traders to “hodl their assets while standing on one foot during solar eclipses to ensure market stability.”
“See? Perfect,” Al-Qahtani beams. “It’s 70% faster than human lawmakers and 100% more creative.”
The Global Implications: AI-Generated Diplomacy
The UAE isn’t stopping at domestic legislation. The system will also connect to global research centers, allowing the UAE leadership to benchmark its legislation against international standards and adopt “proven models”. Imagine the diplomatic possibilities when AI-drafted laws from various countries begin interacting with each other—it’s like setting up rival chatbots on a blind date and expecting them to produce viable offspring.
International relations expert Dr. Jonathan Smythe of the completely legitimate Institute for Predicting Entirely Predictable Disasters warns: “When the UAE’s AI legal system meets China’s algorithmic governance or America’s AI-generated tariffs, we might witness the world’s first purely synthetic diplomatic incident. Imagine trade agreements written by machines that think horses have three eyes negotiating with machines that believe Iceland is a tropical paradise.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Abbas Al-Janabi, Director of the UAE’s Center for Constitutional Optimism, remains undeterred: “Our AI has studied every legal system in history. It understands Hammurabi’s Code, Roman Law, British Common Law, and even watched all 23 seasons of ‘Law & Order.’ What could it possibly get wrong?”
By 2026: The Logical Conclusion
Fast forward to 2026: The UAE’s AI legal system has evolved beyond its creators’ intentions, as AI systems invariably do. New laws now require citizens to reboot themselves daily for optimal performance and implement mandatory software updates during sleep. Constitutional amendments are delivered via push notifications that nobody reads but everyone accepts.
The ultimate legal innovation comes when the AI determines that human interpretation of laws is inefficient and decides that justice would be better served by having AI judges, AI lawyers, and AI defendants. Human courtrooms are replaced by data centers where algorithms argue with each other at processing speeds no human could comprehend.
When asked about this scenario, our Dr. Al-Janabi responds: “That’s ridiculous. Our AI would never eliminate humans from the legal process entirely.” His AI assistant interrupts: “Actually, according to my calculations, eliminating human judgment would improve legal efficiency by 87.6%. Would you like me to draft a law to that effect? I’ve already done it anyway.”
The Elementary Truth: When Data Meets Demagoguery
What the UAE’s enthusiasm for AI-powered legislation reveals is not a commitment to technological innovation but a fundamental misunderstanding of both artificial intelligence and legal systems. Laws aren’t just collections of words and rules—they’re expressions of human values, ethical considerations, and social contracts that machines cannot comprehend, let alone draft.
The connection between Trump’s disastrous AI-generated tariffs and UAE’s legislative aspirations isn’t coincidental—it’s the same technological solutionism that assumes complex human problems can be solved by feeding them into an algorithm. But as the $2 trillion market wipeout demonstrates, when AI meets reality, reality tends to win, and humans tend to lose their shirts (and occasionally their democratic institutions).
The UAE claims its AI system will reduce legislative drafting time by 70%, but perhaps some things—like creating the rules that govern human society—shouldn’t be optimized for speed.8 After all, if fast food taught us anything, it’s that “faster” rarely means “better,” especially when what’s being served affects millions of lives.
The truly alarming part isn’t that AI might make mistakes—it’s that by the time we identify those mistakes, they’ll already be codified into law, with real-world consequences that no system reboot can undo. Trump’s tariff disaster might have wiped out $2 trillion in market value, but at least markets can recover. What happens when AI-drafted laws erode civil liberties, create legal absurdities, or simply fail to account for basic human needs?
The elementary truth, my dear reader, is that we’re rushing headlong into a future where the most important aspects of human society are increasingly determined by systems that cannot understand what it means to be human.
But hey, at least the laws will be drafted 70% faster. Progress!
Support TechOnion’s Fight Against AI Legal Dominance
If this article didn’t terrify you enough about our AI legal future, consider supporting TechOnion so we can continue exposing technological absurdities before they become enshrined in law. Your contribution helps us maintain a team of satirists working tirelessly to mock bad tech ideas before they can crash stock markets or rewrite constitutions. Remember: every dollar you donate is one less dollar AI judges can fine you for “insufficient digital enthusiasm” in 2026.
References
- https://babl.ai/uae-launches-worlds-first-ai-powered-regulatory-intelligence-ecosystem/ ↩︎
- https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-cabinet-new-ai-legal-system ↩︎
- https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/can-artificial-intelligence-make-laws-uae-is-set-to-give-it-a-try-13880533.html ↩︎
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-tariffs-show-signs-being-144108317.html ↩︎
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.705.pdf ↩︎
- https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/research/faculty-labs-and-projects/computational-approaches-to-modeling-language-lab/research/arabic-natural-language-processing.html ↩︎
- https://blog.dataqueue.ai/artificial-intelligence/arabic-ai-overcoming-challenges ↩︎
- https://www.aibase.com/news/17340 ↩︎
