This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
It was mid-April when I watched Rep. Michael Boutin (R-Barre City) walk off the House floor. Representatives were debating the year’s major education reform bill, and I was keeping a close eye on Boutin and Rep. Shawn Sweeney (D-Shelburne) to see how the first-year legislators would vote. An early exit was not what I’d been expecting.
By then, I’d spent dozens of hours shadowing Boutin and Sweeney for a story about what it’s like to serve as a rookie in Vermont’s citizen legislature. I’d watched both representatives navigate the Statehouse’s maze of traditions: caucus meetings, floor speeches, cafeteria seating. Much of what I observed felt timeless, as if the legislative process remained barely touched by modern advancements.
I descended from my perch in the chamber’s balcony to find Boutin in his committee room, snacking on Easter candy and reviewing his notes. As I sat down next to him to talk about his stance on the education bill, he casually opened a tab on his laptop that made my eyes widen. Boutin was using ChatGPT to help decide his vote on the highest-profile reform effort of the session. The night prior, he’d spent $20 to unlock the artificial intelligence tool’s premium features, which let him upload the 150-page bill for analysis.
“I threw it into ChatGPT and had it summarized for me,” Boutin said. “I shouldn’t tell you that, but that’s what I did.”
He turned his screen toward me and scrolled through the prompts he’d fed the chatbot: requests to compare the House bill with the Scott administration’s proposal, explain the tax impact on Barre City and produce timelines that other lawmakers admitted were hard to parse from the dense text. It had turned hours of reading into minutes of scrolling. While a live stream of the ongoing floor debate played quietly from his phone, Boutin told me the bot’s answers hadn’t changed his vote but helped him understand the bill’s moving parts.
The admission wasn’t dramatic. He wasn’t breaking any rules, at least to my knowledge. To anyone walking by, it looked like a legislator reviewing notes and having a snack as a reporter watched. But it felt like a turning point. Boutin said this was the first time he’d used artificial intelligence to analyze a bill — and likely not the last.
Suddenly, I could see the impact ChatGPT and generative AI like it were poised to have in Vermont’s citizen legislature. Here was a first-year representative in a building defined by tradition and paper — reaching for a tool born far outside that world to make sense of consequential legislation.
When I began reporting the story in January, I thought I would document the rites of passage that shape a first term. And in many ways, I did. The final story showed readers how Boutin and Sweeney learned procedures, deciphered committees, and figured out when to speak and when to stay quiet. But that moment in April, with Easter candy wrappers on the table, showed me something else: Even in one of Vermont’s oldest institutions, the future can arrive quickly and quietly, one prompt at a time.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Biggest Break From Tradition”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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