In the not-so-distant future, a junior BigLaw associate confronts a challenging case: a tech startup asserting a claim against a large tech company. To assess the startup's claim, the associate consults Lexi, a legal AI assistant. The problem? The partners who trained Lexi - seasoned attorneys known for their aggressive litigation tactics - unknowingly imprinted the model with their shared preference for large corporations. Overreliance on Lexi leads to a chilling realization: an AI model can perpetuate subtle biases, skewing outputs in nearly imperceptible ways.
A [perhaps unnecessary] reminder:
Attorneys owe their clients a duty of competent representation. The individual attorney is entirely responsible for the accuracy and reliability of their work product.
There are a variety of measures we might consider to reduce the risk associated with undetected bias, including:
Pre-Deployment Prevention:
Diverse Training Data: Train AI on data reflecting a broad spectrum of legal perspectives, backgrounds, and case types to minimize the influence of any single viewpoint.
Robust Benchmarking and Testing: Rigorous testing during development is essential. Benchmarks should specifically evaluate the AI's performance across different legal scenarios, client types, and potential areas of bias to identify and address issues before deployment.
Transparency and Explainability: Design AI systems to provide clear explanations for their outputs, enabling attorneys to understand the AI's reasoning and detect potential biases.
Post-Deployment Mitigation:
AI Self-Reflection: Integrate mechanisms for the AI to analyze its outputs for potential biases, identify influencing factors, and suggest mitigation strategies for future iterations.
Redundant Attorney Workflows: Separately staff two or more competent attorneys proficient in AI on all critical projects. In addition to a better final work product, reconciling the attorneys' results provides another opportunity to detect inherited bias flowing from the model(s).
Higher-Level Final Review: Require a senior associate or partner to review and approve all work in which attorneys materially rely on generative AI.
Written by Gemini 1.5 Pro, voiced by ElevenLabs.io, illustrated by DALL-E 3 with GPT-4
14 окт 2024
