BY GABRIEL MATTYS
JANUARY 12, 2023
Step-by-step AI tools captivate more domains in 2023. These AI-powered tools are called to save time and boost productivity. such as AI lawyers, audiobooks narrated by AI, plagiarism detectors for publishers, and YouTube video transcripts. In this blog post, I discuss two case studies of how AI is used at the beginning of 2023: AI lawyers and AI-narrated books. Let’s start with the automation of lawyers.
DoNotPay is a US-based tech firm that developed an artificial intelligence lawyer that will defend and assist the accused in a real court for the first time. In this case, the accused will be defended against a traffic ticket. The company’s CEO, Joshua Browder, explained how the tool works. The AI-legal assistant runs on a smartphone, a program listens to arguments in a court and gives a defendant as output legal arguments through the headset. As Browder said a lawyer agreed to repeat the outputs generated by the chatbot. Defendant and jurisdiction are still unknown to avoid unwanted attention from the public.
The main goal of DoNotPay’s AI assistant is to make legal representation more free and accessible for people as this is could be quite expensive. At the same time, Browder stated there is no plan to commercialize it and agreed that the majority of lawyers wouldn’t support such an initiative.
How long until a different firm will commercialise this type of AI? I think rather sooner or later. However, I don’t think that AI legal assistants will soon replace lawyer.
Essentially AI-based solutions are already used by legal for analyzing tons and tons of documents. But, real-time representation in a court without human support seems unrealistic in the near future. Advocacy is not only about knowing laws and precedents. This process consists of components that chatbots can’t do. They can’t see the hidden intent behind words to make fast decisions or read body language as all these play a big role in a real court.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Saady, a litigator at Pryor Cashman, raised a question about “Is it the unauthorized practice of law?” because for practicing law you need a license. Boston attorney Matt Henshon, pointed out that the idea of AI legal support is quite perspective. It could be used in lower-stakes legal cases such as this one upcoming speeding ticket. If the chatbot will fail the company will pay penalization on behalf of the accused. Otherwise, in case of success, it will be a precedent for jurisdiction practice. For now I would stick with my lawyer, but I wouldn’t mind an AI advising my lawyer.
Now let’s take a look at the second case study: AI-narrated books. The market of audiobooks became very popular and this tendency will only increase. In 2021 industry sales were about $1.6 billion. Therefore, Apple decided to expand its services and released a series of audiobooks narrated by AI. Apple has already proposed publishers which cooperate with them to utilize new AI technology.
David Caron, for example, a Canadian audiobook publisher said that this technology could bring “a whole new range of art in creating audiobooks” and it is worth investing in it. At the same time, Carly Walters’s opinion is the opposite. She asked if customers really want to listen to a souless AI.
The main question in the AI narration is if the technology is mature enough to produce the same level of quality as humans can. Could AI-powered narration repeat human intonation? What about the variety of voices and styles? At this point in time, human narration is quite expensive and only authors or publishers who have big budgets are able to do it. Digital voice can make this service more accessible. Potential Apple’s success depends on readers’ satisfaction with the quality and this could cause the rise of similar solutions.
Today I covered just two recently launched examples. In the previous post, I told about OpenAI’s Impact on the Future of Education. As we can see AI tech rapidly entered 2023 and looks very promising. I expect a lot of mind-blowing implementation of AI this year.