Letters | AI: Productivity, not accuracy
"At the end of the day, it is people who practise law, not machines. After all, how does a machine learn to interpret law and case precedents? "
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has encouraged automation, but by no means is it a replacement for professionals in the legal sphere. I was once presented with an interesting case of a man who used AI to generate a community scheme’s conduct rules, and it was painfully obvious.
The document cited repealed laws from 1986, which the AI tool sourced from online blog articles, unable to distinguish between references to laws that are in effect and laws that are not.
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Surely, AI-powered search engines can assist in retrieving cases and statutes that have the potential to be used during litigation (just as any database search engine can).
But the relevance of the search engine’s results must always be subject to scrutiny from a person who is adequately capable of performing legal research.
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One cannot blindly cite information that has not been verified or been factchecked. At the end of the day, it is people who practise law, not machines. After all, how does a machine learn to interpret law and case precedents?
How can a computer be taught to tell what is a bill going through Parliament, which parts of an act are awaiting promulgation, and keep up with the like? Only time will tell, I suppose. But what time has told us thus far, is that when it comes to artificial intelligence, there is no “intelligence” in poor legal research.
Ashwini Singh Durban
