Artificial intelligence
Harnessing innovative technologies to meet future challenges
A new joint report entitled A New National Purpose, which explores how the UK can harness innovative technologies to meet future challenges, has recently been published by Tony Blair and William Hague. The “cross-party” report argues that we are currently undergoing a new form of Industrial Revolution “as developments in artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, climate […]
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ChatGPT: implications for the legal world
Chatbots have been around since the 1960s and coders have been trying to pass the Turing test ever since, creating increasingly sophisticated iterations of natural language processing (NLP) software. A recent episode, where a Google engineer was sacked for claiming that the search engine’s chatbot generator software known as LaMDA was sentient, perhaps demonstrates the […]
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AI legal technology: fact vs fiction
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term which is routinely bandied about in discussions about legal technology. Companies selling software to the legal sector almost ubiquitously proclaim that their products are “powered with AI” in their marketing literature. But is this apparent meteoric rise of AI within legal tech of any real consequence, or is it […]
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Accountability for algorithms
Sometimes it is hard to remember that law goes on being made during pandemics, just as it does during wars and in economic crises. The laws made now whilst we battle with the ethical and economic impact of possible further lock-downs and social distancing measures, is intended to regulate future activities, even if we can’t […]
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ICLR.4 and the genie in the bottle
Some years ago the editor of this Newsletter complained of the over-use of the description “artificial intelligence” in legal products: “hyping AI is unhelpful”, he said. “AI is just what computers do.” And he’s not alone in expressing scepticism about the often extravagant claims of AI. Much of the mystique around it stems from simple […]
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The EU AI Regulations: taming the machine
Finally, after nearly three years of consultation, white papers and industry input, on 21st April 2021, the European Commission published its proposals for Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence (the “Regulations”). The over-arching aim of the Regulations is to ensure that fast changing AI technology is applied and supplied across Europe according to a […]
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Artificial Intelligence and the Legal Profession
How are new technologies changing the practice of law? With examples and explanations drawn from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and other common law countries, as well as from China and Europe, this book considers the opportunities and implications for lawyers as artificial intelligence systems become commonplace in legal service delivery. It examines what lawyers […]
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OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence
It was recently announced that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to host the Secretariat of the new Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). The GPAI consists of a collection of countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Korea, Singapore, Slovenia, UK and USA) along with the European Union. […]
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Who owns an AI-generated invention?
One wet Sunday afternoon I was playing with an interface to OpenAI’s machine learning model, GPT-2, which was trained to predict the next word in a sentence and which can now generate articles of synthetic text based on a sentence provided to it. I typed, “Can AI own the copyright in the work that it […]
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Automated Intelligence – a strategy that delivers tangible business benefits today
A constant stream of technological innovations has now become the norm, with each new technology promising to be a game-changer for business in the future. Artificial intelligence (AI) immediately comes to mind as the latest ‘silver bullet’. In fact, the widespread view is that AI is going to take the legal sector by storm – […]
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What we learned in 2017 (2): AI, robots and social media
AI and robots in law practice From Brian Inkster: AI continued to be a de rigueur slot in legal technology conferences during 2017. But delegates inevitably left these conferences none the wiser as to what they are actually supposed to do with AI in their own legal practices or how much it might cost them. […]
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Artificial intelligence in law in perspective
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a very broad term, covering everything from relatively simple document automation techniques right through to Stanley Kubrick’s HAL For purposes of this article, we will consider AI to mean the current application of “intelligent” technologies to provide a solution to a problem, as opposed to a free thinking machine. In this […]
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