In my blog post last week I asked the question whether an AI created and driven estate or long term care plan can work. More specifically, what place do I see it having when it comes to addressing the problems we help our clients solve every day. As I said last week, we have begun to receive AI generated reports from callers asking us to implement the recommendations made in those reports and/or to comment on them. I expect these scenarios to be more frequent in the coming years.
I view these requests no differently than when someone calls and asks my opinion about what another attorney told them or asks me to review documents prepared by another lawyer. The advice given or the documents drafted are not done in a vacuum. I need to know what information the caller provided to the attorney. Additionally, I often need information that the previous attorney didn’t have or didn’t ask for. This is especially the case when the previous attorney was someone who doesn’t concentrate their practice in the field of estate and/or long term care planning.
When presented with a caller who didn’t consult with an attorney, but instead used AI to arrive at a plan, my approach is no different. I look at AI as the ”attorney” in this equation. What information was AI given that was used to generate the report (advice) or the AI created documents that the caller now asks me to comment on? My response, however, remains the same as when I am asked to comment on another attorney’s work or advice.
There is a term I learned years ago in school when studying computer science – “garbage in garbage out”. It very simply expresses the principal that in any system or in attempting to solve any problem, the quality of the output is dependent on the quality of the input. If inaccurate or incomplete data is “fed” into the system, the outcome will be inaccurate, rendering it useless. In my case, I need to know what information the caller provided to the previous attorney or to AI. In many cases there is also more information that I need that the caller never previously provided.
But, there is another reason why I believe AI is a poor substitute for what we as estate and long term care planning attorneys provide. I’ll share that with you next week.