Professor Emmert on Task Force for Development of AI Guidelines
06/01/2023
Professor Frank Emmert was asked to serve on the Silicon Valley Arbitration & Mediation Center Task Force. The entity is developing guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in dispute settlement procedures.
Professor Emmert has been researching and teaching about AI, Blockchain technology, and digital currencies since 2017. He analyzes and evaluates regulatory approaches from many countries to highlight best and worst practices and has published several law review articles and has more pieces in the works. He is the John S. Grimes Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at IU McKinney.
"If a student - to save time - enters buzzwords into large language models like ChatGPT to swiftly obtain longer essays for submission, and then the professor - to save time - enters those essays into ChatGPT to reduce them to buzzwords for grading, the only one learning anything along the way is ChatGPT,” Professor Emmert said. “Much the same could happen in arbitration and even litigation, but with much more serious consequences. We need rules for both. On the one hand, we want to be open to technological advances and use them to our advantage, including saving time. On the other hand, humans in general, and lawyers in particular, have to ensure that justice and the rule of law are never compromised. Although they can process huge amounts of information in seconds, large language models are ultimately like parrots. They create new content by imitating and restating existing content. Their ethical standards are only as good - or as bad - as anything and everything they can find on the internet. Woe to us humans if we should ever lose the ability to oversee and control what our ever more advanced technology produces and decides!"
