Chat GPT and AI have been a hot topic in the legal field as of late. Many legal research databases such as Lexis and Westlaw have invested millions of dollars into this new and emerging technology. While Lexis and Westlaw are both companies that will combine their legal databases with AI technology, these features have not been released to the public just yet. They are still being tested and adapted for improvement to be used by legal professionals.
Read moreConcerns Swirl Around Facial Recognition Technology
A couple of years ago, we wrote about privacy issues surrounding emerging facial recognition technologies. In the intervening 700 or so days, the conversation has shifted dramatically. With political upheaval and a renewed commitment to racial justice emerging across the nation, the conversation around facial recognition artificial intelligence has taken on a sense of urgency.
Many people are likely familiar with basic facial recongition AI through their phones. For example, Facebook may alert you to a photo that includes you, uploaded without your knowledge by a friend, through an automated system that asks “Is this you?” Another example is Google Photos, which automatically builds albums of friends, family members, and pets, allowing you to identify them by name for easy searching.
However, the most lucrative markets for this type of tech are law enforcement and defense. In Detroit, the police have recently come under heat for two known instances of Black men being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit on the basis of the department’s facial recognition AI. The Detroit Chief of Police acknowledged the software has an incredible 96% false identification rate, which for some has raised questions about the software’s value to the community. The Detroit Police Department has promised to draft a policy about the use of this tech, which is produced by the company DataWorksPlus. In the meantime, a Congressional inquiry has been launched to examine the two facial recognition programs produced by DataWorksPlus, which are used by law enforcement in at least five states.
Tech companies working to produce this type of software are coming under pressure to stop its sale and production, not just by Congress or justice reform advocates, but by their own employees. One example is IBM, which has removed its general purpose facial recognition offerings from the market, and is urging other companies to do the same.
Arguments against use of facial recognition technology by government entities including law enforcement have previously focused on the inaccuracy of such tech. As we see from Detroit, that remains an issue. However, as this type of AI improves, concern has increasingly begun to shift towards the awesome power of accurate facial recognition tech, and its ability to obliterate privacy. As a result of of this, some local jurisditions have begun to specifically outlaw the use of facial recnognition tech. These municipalities are mostly cities in California and Massachusetts, incuding San Francisco and Boston, but now also include Portland, Maine.
One advancement is that facial recognition AI increasingly focuses on the space immediately around the eyes, so that would-be law-breakers and other evil-doers will struggle more to hide their identities. This also means that wearing a mask while you’re shopping might not stop corporate security from identifying you.
Further reading:
Robot Justice
In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, AI Artificial Intelligence, scientists program a robotic boy to understand and express a full range of human emotions, including love. The boy is adopted into a family as a test case where he learns to connect with the couple who become his parents. After a series of unexpected events, the family’s living arrangement becomes unsustainable. The mother begins to fear the boy and abandons him in the woods, consigning him to an uncertain fate. The boys sets out to navigate a complex world where he’s neither fully human nor fully machine.
Fast forward thousands of years to a time when alien life forms have arrived on planet Earth. Here, they discover the body of the robotic boy at the bottom of a frozen river and seek to reverse engineer his design. This quasi-human creation is their only connection to the Earthling inhabitants who preceded them, and they wish to understand his emotions. He was programmed by humans, they reason, so traces of their humanness still exist within his code.
In addition to film’s impressive special effects, its evocative music, and the spectrum of feelings it inspires, this movie also teaches a lesson: software bears the marks of the people who write the code. All of the assumptions, biases, and predetermined social perspectives that we possess get baked in to the algorithms, creating smart machines that lack the objectivity we expect them to exhibit. They inherit our prejudices and act accordingly. Nowhere is this being discussed more widely, it seems, than in the application of AI to the law. The articles listed here, found in popular magazines and journals, describe various ways that AI is being used — and misused — to predict crime, sentence offenders, and determine the likelihood of criminal recidivism. They also explore the limits of AI, the ethics of using AI to mete out justice, and the regulations that some are proposing to counteract the harmful effects of machine bias.
Artificial Intelligence is Now Used to Predict Crime. But is it Biased? (Smithsonian)
Can Crime Be Predicted by an Algorithm? from Hello World by Hannah Fry (Penguin)
Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair (Nature)
Machine Bias: Risk Assessments in Criminal Sentencing (ProPublica)
We Need an FDA for Algorithms (Nautilus)
AI Research is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog (Wired)
One State’s Bail Reform Exposes the Promise and Pitfalls of Tech-Driven Justice (Wired)
Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now. (Wired)
Management AI: Bias, Criminal Recidivism, And the Promise of Machine Learning (Forbes)
Trust but Verify: A Guide to Algorithms and the Law (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology)
[VIDEO] The Truth About Algorithms (Aeon)
The Rise of the Legal Chatbots
Hello, I’m Lawson, your legal robot assistant. How can I help you?
This is the kind of prompt you might encounter on a website that offers customer service by chat. Friendly avatars greet you on retail websites, ready to sell you everything from appliances to vehicles. A virtual concierge, for example, might help you plan your next vacation. Even tech support is often provided via a chat or messaging feature. And now in law, chatbots or “robot lawyers” are facilitating access to the legal system and helping users handle simple legal matters.
Perhaps the most well-known legal chatbot is DoNotPay, a tool that guides users through a series of questions designed to dispute parking tickets. In recent months, the DoNotPay chatbot has expanded considerably to address a variety of legal concerns including consumer rights, employment law, and landlord-tenant disputes. Soon, the creator of the site, Josh Browder, hopes to offer a chatbot that will handle your divorce.
Hate Crime Help is a newer addition to the army of chatbots ready to help people who have been victims of hate crimes, including violence, verbal attacks, property damage, and harassment. The app lets you specify that the crime was motivated by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, gender, or sexual orientation. It then provides contact information for local resources linked to your zip code that will help you get the legal relief you need. Additional information about what the law says regarding hate crimes at the state and national levels is provided, along with a point-by-point comparison of hate crimes and bias incidents.
ProTechMe uses a chatbot to quickly and efficiently collect information needed for securing a protective order in Harris County. Its design is based on the Texas Attorney General's Protective Order kit (which can be found here on TexasLawHelp.org). Information that is gathered via the chatbot auto-populates a pdf document that the user can then print out and submit to the district attorney or to a legal aid office. Victims of family violence are often closely monitored by their abusers, and using the Internet to search for help may not be a safe option. Although ProTechMe is still in development, it may, eventually, become a safer and more practical way for victims to get the help and information they need.
Robots are unlikely to replace lawyers any time soon, if ever, despite media reports that sometimes sensationalize the impact of chatbots and related AI technologies. However, there is no doubt that technology will continue to shape the practice of law and change how clients interface with the legal system. Embracing technology as a tool for facilitating access to justice is advisable, for, as the robot overlords always say, resistance is futile.
Tomorrow: LEGAL TECH INSTITUTE CLE: THE ROBOT LAWYER
Join us on Thursday, September 28, 12pm - 1pm, for The Robot Lawyer: Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law. Saskia Mehlhorn, Director of Knowledge Management & Library Services, Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP will give specific examples of tools that incorporate AI technology and discuss opportunities for lawyers and other legal professionals. To register, click here.
PLEASE NOTE: The location of this CLE has changed. It will not be held at the Harris County Law Library. The HBA is generously providing space for this event at the Heritage Plaza Conference Room, 1111 Bagby Street. Please see the announcement for further details.