The American Bar Association believes the use of artificial intelligence in the legal sector is eroding key procedures, documentary records and evidence relied on to establish ground-level truth in the court system.
In a
report released this month the ABA, which sets ethical standards for the legal profession and oversees the accreditation of roughly 400,000 attorneys in the United States, details how AI has permeated throughout the legal system. The report says lawyers increasingly use it to save time, conduct research, summarize and write key court filings, while judges use it for many of the same functions.
But as artificial intelligence – particularly generative AI tools – has been integrated throughout the legal system, it’s raising major questions for a profession that depends on accuracy and truthful representation in court.
“Faced with deepfakes offered as evidence in court or claims that legitimate evidence is a deepfake, judges are grappling with questions surrounding the authenticity, validity, and reliability of AI-generated evidence,” the ABA stated.
One of the most pressing challenges facing the court system is figuring out how to handle the emergence of lifelike, deepfake media. Fake imagery, audio and video can convincingly imitate the kinds of evidence courts have relied on for decades to determine what actually happened in a case.
With voice cloning and deepfake tools, bad actors can also create convincing media depicting judges, lawyers, witnesses or others involved in court cases in a false light, saying or doing things they never did. The ABA report cites reporting over the past year from agencies like the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and organizations like the World Economic Forum warning that deepfakes pose a significant, long-term national security threat.
“The ease with which content can now be created and shared, as well as the use of algorithms that are optimized for engagement, means misinformation can spread widely and quickly,” the ABA report stated.
The findings are part of a broader report that outlines both the risks and benefits of incorporating AI technologies into the legal profession. And it comes as courts across the world have reported problems with the technology, including
AI-generated legal briefs that cite hallucinated case law and other errors and questions around the ethics of presenting
deepfaked testimony from dead victims in criminal proceedings.
cyberscoop.com
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