The S.C. House of Representatives is using a customized version of Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence tool to identify and potentially eliminate “outdated” rules buried in the state’s code of regulations, House leaders announced this week.
“South Carolina is leading the way with AI,” House Speaker Murrell Smith (R-Sumter) said in a Nov. 27 social media post. “Chairman @JeffBradleyhhi and the AI Committee are partnering with Google to declutter outdated regulations, setting an example for the nation.”
According to AI Committee Chairman Jeff Bradley (R-Beaufort), the initiative began in September, when he raised the idea with Google executives at a company-hosted event for government leaders in Chicago.
“They’re taking our Code of Regulations and they’re using that as a large language model,” Bradley told Pluribus News on Nov. 22. “We’re looking to use this to identify obsolete, duplicative, confusing regulations … [and then] get rid of them or change them.”
Fellow GOP committee member Sylleste Davis (R-Berkeley) lauded the effort, calling it “a great use of AI” that “will lead to a streamlining of regulations.”
But consistent with Beaufort GOP Sen. Tom Davis’s recent observation that dominant majorities of the kind Republicans currently enjoy in the state legislature inevitably split into factions, S.C. Freedom Caucus Chair Jordan Pace (R-Berkeley) quickly attacked the idea from the right.
“We don’t need to ‘declutter’ the regulatory state,” Pace wrote in response to Smith on X. “We need to attack it with chainsaws not scalpels. Redundancies aren’t suppressing small businesses, the idea of the regulatory state is responsible for that. They don’t keep us safe, they keep us poor.”
The S.C. House will take up regulatory reform when the 2025-26 session kicks off in January.
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