Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
The use of AI in the legal field is the gift that keeps on giving.
This time, it’s the grim sense of disappointment that arose when a team building an AI chatbot for Alaska’s court system actually tested it and found that it was a hallucinatory disaster, nbc news reports,
The chatbot, called the Alaska Virtual Assistant, was designed to help people handle forms and other processes involved in probate, the legal process of transferring a person’s belongings after they die.
In a predictable turn of events, instead of streamlining an already headache-inducing process for those who may be grieving the loss of a loved one, the AI muddled simple questions and left most users feeling irritated rather than supported.
According to people involved in its development, the venerable virtual assistant continued to hallucinate, or make up facts and share exaggerated information, demonstrating a failure inherent in all major language models.
“Regardless of the model, we had a problem of hallucination, where the chatbot really shouldn’t have been using anything outside of its knowledge base,” said Aubrey Souza, a consultant at the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). nbc news“For example, when we asked, ‘Where can I get legal aid?’ It will tell you, ‘There is a law school in Alaska, and so look at the alumni network,’ But there is no law school in Alaska,
And instead of finding it useful, most people who tested it found it incredibly annoying. This bot, surprisingly, suffered from the same character flaws that plague most chatbots: being overly sycophantic and sycophantic, pretending to be empathetic and just giving you pleasantries instead of getting down to business.
“Through our user testing, everyone said, ‘I’m tired of everyone in my life telling me they’re sorry for my loss,'” Souza said. “So we basically removed those types of senses, because with an AI chatbot, you don’t need another one.”
Created in collaboration with Tom Martin, a lawyer who runs a company called LawDroid that makes AI legal tools, AVA AI has been stuck in development hell for over a year now, while it was “supposed to be a three-month project” according to Souza. After tempering its expectations — and certainly ironing out its glaring flaws — AVA’s team says it’s finally ready for public launch in late January.
“We’ve changed our goals a little bit on this project,” said Stacey Marz, administrative director of the Alaska Court System and AVA project leader. nbc news“We wanted to replicate what our human facilitators at the Self-Help Center are able to share with people, But due to some inaccuracies and some incompleteness issues, we are not confident that bots can work in that manner,”
“It was very laborious to do,” Marz said, “despite all the talk about generic AI, and everyone saying it will revolutionize self-help and democratize access to the courts.”
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