What Happened When Alaska's Court System Tried Answering Questions with an AI Chatbot?

An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents 'was supposed to be a three-month project,' said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. 'We are now at well over a year and three months, but that's all because of the due diligence that was required to get it right.'

'With a project like this, we need to be 100% accurate, and that's really difficult with this technology,' said Stacey Marz, the administrative director of the Alaska Court System and one of the Alaska Virtual Assistant (AVA) project's leaders... While many local government agencies are experimenting with AI tools for use cases ranging from helping residents apply for a driver's license to speeding up municipal employees' ability to process housing benefits, a recent Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services. The AVA experience demonstrates the barriers government agencies face in attempting to leverage AI for increased efficiency or better service, including concerns about reliability and trustworthiness in high-stakes contexts, along with questions about the role of human oversight given fast-changing AI systems. These limitations clash with today's rampant AI hype and could help explain larger discrepancies between booming AI investment and limited AI adoption.

The chatbot was developed with Tom Martin, a lawyer/law professor who designs legal AI tools, according to the article. But the project 'had to contend with the serious issue of hallucinations, or instances in which AI systems confidently share false or exaggerated information.'

'We had trouble with hallucinations, regardless of the model, where the chatbot was not supposed to actually use anything outside of its knowledge base,' Souza told NBC News. 'For example, when we asked it, 'Where do I get legal help?' it would tell you, 'There's a law school in Alaska, and so look at the alumni network.' But there is no law school in Alaska.' Martin has worked extensively to ensure the chatbot only references the relevant areas of the Alaska Court System's probate documents rather than conducting wider web searches.

The article concludes that 'what was meant to be a quick, AI-powered leap forward in increasing access to justice has spiraled into a protracted, yearlong journey plagued by false starts and false answers.' But the chatbot is now finally scheduled to be launched in late January. 'It was just so very labor-intensive to do this,' Marz said, despite 'all the buzz about generative AI, and everybody saying this is going to revolutionize self-help and democratize access to the courts.

'It's quite a big challenge to actually pull that off.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.