A “robot lawyer” startup wants to take their chatbot to the US Supreme Court and is willing to give $1 million to anyone who can help get it there. Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, said the company’s AI creation runs on a smartphone, listens to court arguments, and formulates responses for the defendant. The AI lawyer tells the defendant what to say in real time through headphones.
According to Browder, his company will “pay any lawyer or anyone $1,000,000 with an upcoming case before the United States Supreme Court to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says.”
The idea of an “AI lawyer” sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. And I must commend the startup DoNotPay for coming up with such an innovative concept. Who wouldn’t want to hire a bot to negotiate their Comcast rates or appeal a parking ticket? And now they’re thinking about taking on an eviction case. The tenants will be overjoyed to have a robot represent them in court.
Hearing aids, some of which are Bluetooth-enabled, are permitted in some courts. That is how Browder established that DoNotPay’s technology could be utilized legally. However, this technology is not permitted in most courtrooms. Some states require authorization from all parties to be recorded, which eliminates the idea of a robot lawyer entering many courtrooms. Only two of the 300 cases reviewed by DoNotPay for a trial of their robot lawyer were viable.
Browder has stated on Twitter that DoNotPay will be taking its chatbot to traffic court shortly. The company wants to demonstrate its powers in a higher court because “haters will say the traffic court is too simple for GPT.”
It remains to be seen whether this gamble, which some are calling a PR stunt, will work or is even legal. Nonetheless, the idea of an AI lawyer arguing in front of the country’s top court is intriguing.
