15/01/2023
Al will advise a defendant in court
An artificial intelligence is set to tell a defendant what to say during a court case over a speeding fine. tI is likely to be the first case defended by an Al, reports Matthew Sparkes
AN ARTIFICIAL intelligence is set toadviseadefendantincourtfor
the first time ever. The Al will run on a smartphone and listen to all speech in a courtroom in February
before instructing the defendant on what to say via an earpiece.
The location oft h e court
a n d t h e n a m e of t h e d e f e n d a n t
are being kept under wraps by
DoNotPay, the company behind the AI. But it is understood that
the defendant is charged with
speeding and will say only what DoNotPay's tool tells them to
via an earbud. The case is being considered as a test by the firm,
which has agreed to pay if any
fines are imposed, says its founder, Joshua Browder.
DoNotPay is also offering $1 million to anyone with an
upcomingcaseat theUSSupreme Court if they will do the same
t h i n g , t h o u g h t h e d e t a i l s o f t h i s are still to be confirmed.
Using a smartphone or
c o m p u t e r c o n n e c t e d t o a n i n - e a r
device in court is illegal in most countries, but DoNotPay has found a locationwhere this set-up
can be classed as a hearing aid and therefore allowed, says Browder.
"It's technically within the rules,
but Idon't think it's in the spirit of the rules," he says.
Browder says he has used the AI to talk directly to customer service
staff at abank with asynthesised voice, and it successfully reversed
several bank fees on its own.
"It's the most mind-blowing thing that I've ever done," says
Browder. "It's only $16 that we
got reversed, but that's the perfect job for AI - who has time towaste on hold for $16?"
DoNotPay was launched in 2015 as achatbot that provided
legaladviceonconsumer issues,
relying heavily on templated conversations. The firm started
focusing more on Al in 2020, 8| NewScientist |14 January2023
when OpenAl released a public
programming interface for people totapintotheabilitiesofGPT-3,
its language-processing AI.
B r o w d e r s a y s it t o o k a l o n g t i m e to train the DoNotPay Al o n the
vast a m o u n t s of case law needed t o m a k e i t u s e f u l . D o N o t P a y ' s AI
app now covers a wider range of topics, including immigration law,
and the company claims it has intervened in about 3 million c a s e s i n t h e US a n d t h e UK.
The Al had to be trained to stick to factual statements, rather
than saying whatever it could to win a case regardless of truth.
"A lot of lawyers are
just charging way too m u c h m o n e y t o c o p y and paste documents"
"We're trying tominimise our legal liability,' says Browder. "And it's not good if it actually twists
facts and is too manipulative." The audio tool has also been
tweaked to not automaticallv
react tostatementsevery time. "Sometimes silence is the best
answer," says Browder. He says his goal is that the software will
$ 1 million is on offer
to use an Al lawyer at theUSSupremeCourt
e v e n t u a l l y r e p l a c e s o m e l a w y e r s . "It's allabout language, and
that's what lawyers charge
h u n d r e d s o r t h o u s a n d s o f d o l l a r s
an hour to do," he says. "There'll
still be alot ofgood lawyers out
there who may be arguing in the European Court of Human
Rights (ECHR), but a lot oflawyers are just charging way too much
money to copy and paste
documents and Ithink they will definitely bereplaced, and they should be replaced."
Nikos Aletras at the University of Sheffield, UK, who has created an Al that can accurately predict
the outcome ofcases at the
ECHR, says he has seen growing
use of machine learning in the
legal system. But he also warns
that its adoption needs to be carefully considered.
He says that providing real-time
audio legal advice in acourtroom wouldstillbeatechnological
challenge, and ethical and legal issues remain, such as whether it would even be legal to use.
Neil Brown at UK law firm
decoded.legal says that using recording equipment in a UK
court would breach the Contempt ofCourt Act 1981, and that courts
may interpret this Al system as falling foul of that rule.
"Since it appears to involve
transmitting the audio to a third party's servers and processing
that audio within the resulting computer system, I'd have thought that a judge might well conclude that it was being recorded, even
if deleted soon afterwards,"
says Brown. "So probably not
something to try here unless
you fancy contempt proceedings,
at least not without checking it with the judge first."
But when New Scientist asked the UK Ministry of Justice, which
overseesthejusticesystem in England and Wales, if such a trial
w o u l d b e l e g a l , a s p o k e s p e r s o n
pointed to an application process recently put in place to request a
"McKenzie friend", despite it not
referring to AI. These people don't have to be qualified lawyers, but
defendants have the right to have them sit in court and offer advice.
"We wouldn't be able to say whether it was 100 per cent legal
or not until an application was made to implement the system
and our lawyers made a decision," says the spokesperson.
Brown says that AI will probably
play a useful role in the legal system in the future, but that it would be likely to assist lawyers rather than replace them.
"When your lawyer tells you 'OK, let's do A, we trust them that they have the expertise
and the knowledge toadvise us." says Aletras. "But [with AIl, it's
very hard to trust predictions.
We'requitefaroffbeingableto do these things reliably and get
rid of lawyers. We have to be very careful of makingsuch claims." - New Scientist
