AI is capable of a lot of things, from voice assistants that help you with your day-to-day tasks to chatbots that can write entire essays for you. But something it hasn’t been able to do so far is arguing in court for you – until now. A court case next month will be taken up by the “world’s first robot lawyer,” according to a report by New Scientist. The AI-enabled legal assistant will help get a defendant out of a speeding ticket in court by telling them what to say throughout the case via an earpiece. Behind the robot lawyer is San Franciso-based startup DoNotPay, which will cover any potential fines in case things do not work out. While the use of this kind of technology is illegal in most countries, DoNotPay has found a location where it can work around these rules. The location hasn’t been disclosed, though, as has the date of the case and the name of the defendant. Joshua Browder, a computer scientist educated from Stanford University, launched DoNotPay in 2015 as a legal services chatbot designed to help consumers deal with late fees and fines. The company’s official website says that it uses “AI to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.” DoNotPay’s goal is to offer a level playing field and “make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.” Browder told the New Scientist said that training DoNotPay’s AI assistant on the breadth of case law took a long time in order to ensure that the app always sticks to the truth. The AI has been trained in a way that it does not react to everything in the court. Instead, it listens to arguments, analyses them, and instructs the defendant on how to respond. What an AI-dominated world would look like in the near future is becoming an increasingly debatable topic. This latest experiment only goes to show how AI could render certain professions obsolete for humans.
