Acorn Money, Twitter/ @JoshuaBroder

Today, an artificial intelligence firm made a curious offer for any lawyer or person with a case coming up at the Supreme Court to allow an AI to feed them lines, promising anyone who goes through with it will receive $1 million in return.

Joshua Browder and his company DoNotPay offer automated solutions to common legal woes. The service, which has been in operation for several years, gives legal advice from chatbots. It also automates some basic legal actions, such as asking companies to stop sending spam mail.

According to its site, the goal of DoNotPay is to make legal services more accessible and less expensive for people by developing artificial intelligence that can do some of the things lawyers are usually paid a lot of money to do.

A few days ago, DoNotPay was scheduled to have its first day in court. Somebody promised to use the AI in traffic court to combat a speeding charge by putting in AirPods and saying what the robot lawyer tells it to say.

The case will go to trial at some point in February in the United States, although DoNotPay is not naming where exactly because the goal is to use the AI without the court knowing.

According to critics, the viral marketing attempt to admit a robot lawyer into the U.S. Supreme Court would not work and would result in actual legal consequences for the people involved.

But DoNotPay's ambitions reach even higher than robot lawyers, apparently seeking to replace the entire legal system with robots. Some were highly skeptical of these ambitions as the viral tweet spread online throughout the day.

Artificial intelligence technology, if you believe its promoters, does promise to change our world and has already had massive impacts on the art world (as well as much pushback). As such, many posters online imagined what a future that involves robot lawyers might look like, and how these AIs would adapt to different cultural situations.

Last year saw many high-profile advances in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT and art generators like Midjourney. The buzz around the new technology is loud, although predicted changes to the economy and society have yet to arrive. Some are skeptical, comparing the hype around AI to the hype around cryptocurrency in the past.

There is a non-zero chance, however, that this latest development in robot law will end up on your grandchild's history test — and maybe it'll even be graded by a robot teacher.


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Comments 6 total

SecretAgentPickles

Reminds me of the GiTS TV anime. I recall the judges in some scenes being droids that are obviously robots, but dressed up in traditional legal robes

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charli36

Getting an AI to argue a case: Hard, doesn't save much money, still not really feasible.
Getting an AI to aid in discovery by marking what information is pertinent and what is not: fairly easy, can lead to a lot less hours charged, relatively feasible in the coming decade.

12

Helipilot47

This.

A lot of lawyer work is just sifting though papers, files, and all sorts of digital data, trying to piece things together or looking for significant outliers. AI would be absolutely massive for this part of the job.

2

chausies

I can see this being a perfect use case for AI systems. Hiring zillion dollar lawyers is such an annoying thing when a lot of what they do in 90% of cases is a lot of cookie-cutter arguments and referencing previous records. This could be a huge step in "democratizing" good attorneys to the common man.

10

No One Is Immune to Bias

A common criticism of modern law systems in nearly every country is that they use piles and piles of redundant legalese to make it impossible for those outside a clique to interact with it at more than the most basic level. It certainly does go a long way towards making things accessible, and I can't imagine anyone in the field will be happy about this.

7

chausies

You just know the Law Lobby is going to come down like Thor's hammer trying to bring legislation against this (just like how Turbotax lobbies out of their mind to make filing taxes a shit process) <.<.

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