artificial intelligence

Experiencing Bots in Everyday Life

While the world we live in today relies heavily on digital media and technology, the digital era has become more prominent amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Humans now depend on technology to work, to learn, to read and to obtain entertainment now more than ever.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) exists all around us, even if it may not be realized. IOS developer and Computer science graduate, Ilija Mihajlovic, talks about the impact bots have on our everyday lives in his article How Artificial Intelligence is Impacting our Everyday Lives.  He states, “AI assists in every area of our lives, whether we’re trying to read emails, get driving directions, get music or movie recommendations (Mihajlovic, 2).”

One place we experience the use of bots in our daily life is through digital assistants. First developed within iPhones as the well-known AI, Siri, digital assistants have since then been created through various platforms: Alexa, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and more. While these digital assistants may be used on different sorts of sites, they still all serve the same purpose, and that is to assist.

Although quite annoying, most people have likely encountered the security measures taken to enter most websites at least once. The websites that use these these types of security checks solidify their reason by saying “are you a robot?” We take the tests to ensure to the robots running the sites that we are not robots.

HackTX 2018 Puzzle 3: Shopping Cart | by Florian Janke | Medium

Some of the different security tests that we use include the image provided where you have to choose all the cats; a combination of letters and numbers that you have to type into an answer box; or simply just a check box with the phrase, “I’m not a robot,” beside it. While it has been said that bots may be grading and writing first drafts of our papers (according to McKee & Porter), they are still unable to distinguish the difference between a cat and a dog.

As our world continues to make technological advances, the use of bots in our everyday lives will become more substantial. Heidi McKee and Jim Porter discuss the role that many bots and AI’s will take in the near future in their article The Impact of AI Writing and Writing Instruction. Bots will eventually be used in the workplace and in our classrooms; but the question is: is it such a bad thing for our society to rely on the use of bots as we go about our day?

Your Attorney is a Robot

Like many other industries, artificial intelligence technology is slowly becoming an existential threat for many young professionals attempting to break into the legal sector. This is because AI is taking over many of the lower-level tasks historically assigned to junior attorneys and legal assistants and performing them in a fraction of the time.

Robot creating a hologram of a balance (representative of the legal field)

AI has taken over research, litigation forecasting, legal analytics analysis, documents automation, and electronic billing in law firms ranging from small to gigantic throughout the United States. The most devastating of these takeovers is document automation. Writing work that once required a team of junior attorneys to finish in a week has been taken over by writing bots that can complete the same work in minutes.

Obviously, such a dramatic increase in efficiency has caused law firms to find buying a legal writing bot software package and hiring a single junior attorney to supervise its writings much more attractive than hiring and training a whole team of junior attorneys to perform the same work. A depressing fact for the swarms of law students attempting to obtain internships during law school and the graduates trying to start their actual careers.

Robotic attorney

It is worth noting that just as McKee & Porter recommend in their article “The Impact of AI on Writing and Writing Instruction,” law professors are actively reacting to the technology and have begun to instruct their students on leveraging and working alongside legal AI and writing bots.

For example, Harvard Law School has already started to offer “legal innovation and programming” courses. Hopefully, this proactiveness on the part of legal academics will soften the blow of the shift to legal AI integration by law firms and prevent future attorneys from being left in the dust by the technology.

Gif of a scene from "Legally Blonde" saying "Girls, I'm going to Harvard!"

The technology is not all doom & gloom though, as it does hold genuine benefits for the field of law. In a profession centered around billable hours for charging clients, the ability for legal AI to cut week-long tasks down to minutes allows for law firms to become much more affordable and therefore accessible to the “everyman.”

Overall, Legal AI is a multifaceted issue since it is both a tremendously beneficial technology and a severely disruptive one. On the one hand, it will benefit the workflow of many law firms and improve the process of law itself. On the other, the technology is guaranteed to allow law firms to cut down on employees and make it even harder for young legal professionals to break into the already very competitive legal job market. If “Legally Blonde” ever gets a sci-fi remake, it’ll for sure have to include a plotline about dastardly legal writing bots and their desire to replace so many poor junior attorneys.