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The problem is that objections can be generated based entirely on the papers in a way which becomes arbitrarily cheap given good enough LLMs, but even if they are anticipated responding to them may involve expensive activity in the real world, like bat surveys in the most notorious example. It seems to me that giving both sides LLMs will increase the number of "cheap to raise, expensive to rebut" objections.
Right.
And I think the asymmetry is that there's usually zero penalty to raising frivolous objections, especially if they have some basic validity on their face.
We can grant for argument's sake that each regulation is serving a decent purpose, but if there is indeed a cost associated to comply with or rebut the applicability of some rule, then invoking that rule should ideally include a mechanism for making you share in the cost if the objection was without merit.
Prediction markets (or similar) actually might solve this, funny enough.
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That isn't really any different than it is now, though. If a dedicated NIMBY group wants to oppose a project by any means possible, they can hire a lawyer who will argue that §902(a)(4) requires a bat survey, and they might win. A citizen group that generates a massive filing that that nobody understands and basically just list arguments looks impressive from their perspective but gets shot down immediately whenever they have to go in front of a judge and the attorney for the municipality or whoever explains to the judge why §902(a)(4) doesn't apply in this case (which if it obviously did, they would have already done one), and may even produce a report from the guy who does the bat surveys explaining why one wasn't needed in his opinion, and the judge smiles and nods while the pro se NIMBY guy fumbles through his brief trying to find the part about the bats that he can't remember because he didn't even read the whole thing let alone understand the whole thing, and the judge tosses the complaint.
Cutting the cost of well-drafted objections by an order of magnitude means that smaller, less objectionable projects will have well-drafted objections made against them.
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