With Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the edge of disrupting the foundation of the legal sector, Eurojuris International takes a look at the potential risks that come with AI:
- Accuracy and Bias AI is only as good as the data it feeds itself from and even then, amplification of a bias could occur from naturally skewed data, giving the potential for harmful results. This makes AI high-risk for sectors like law and judiciary.
- Client Confidentiality is essential as we know, ensuring clients are safe with third parties, like a system provider offer additional challenges when assessing which companies we use for cybersecurity.
- Firms not Implementing an AI Policy sooner, particularly if staff are using AI casually. There are many commercial products for smaller firms these days and some on-line which gives anyone easy access to use them from anywhere. A good practice policy can formalise its use and help protect staff and company.
- AI Hallucinations arises for example in ChatGPT where the anticipation of the text that should follow can result in a plausible but odd sentence which doesn’t make sense because the AI has no concept of reality. If not properly edited by a human this misleading information could provide errors in information.
- Crime AI is already being used for phishing scams and with its human like interactions, it can become hard to spot. AI could also be used to create false evidence.
- Accountability and Transparency Your firm is responsible for the output of any AI, even if you used a chatbot to obtain it. Firms should consider telling Clients how AI is used in their case and how their data is used in any AI lifecycle. Internal policies may need amending to support local Data Protection Regulation.
- Not being prepared for regulation is a risk many companies face. Regulation is very light-touch across the world with AI, The EU AI Act will impose stricter regulations on some AI uses. This will pose an extra challenge for law firms operating internationally in managing these different regulations.
Despite this, we should remember how many mis-carriages of justice there have been by errors from humans and human witnesses, this provides us with a challenge in the trust people have with computers and makes our journey with AI an interesting but complex one.
