Promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence for legal applications

Authors

Keywords:

Generative AI, Predictive AI, Evaluation

Abstract

Is AI set to redefine the legal profession? We argue that this claim is not supported by the current evidence. We dive into AI's increasingly prevalent roles in three types of legal tasks: information processing; tasks involving creativity, reasoning, or judgment; and predictions about the future. We find that the ease of evaluating legal applications varies greatly across legal tasks, based on the ease of identifying correct answers and the observability of information relevant to the task at hand. Tasks that would lead to the most significant changes to the legal profession are also the ones most prone to overoptimism about AI capabilities, as they are harder to evaluate. We make recommendations for better evaluation and deployment of AI in legal contexts.

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Published

20 May 2024
Total downloads
2202

How to Cite

Kapoor, Sayash, Peter Henderson, and Arvind Narayanan. 2024. “Promises and Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence for Legal Applications”. Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law 2 (2). https://journalcrcl.org/crcl/article/view/62.