When a group of 16 lawyers and law students met in a small auditorium at Zhejiang University’s Guanghua Law School last week, they were facing a unique opponent: an artificial intelligence program designed by Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy.
In the first competition of its kind in China, humans were pitted against AI on Friday in reviewing contracts, one of the most common tasks conducted at law firms. The AI program passed with flying colours, sending its results within a minute after the competition started, state-owned newspaperStill, the best results came from a team consisting of both lawyers and AI, which found the highest number of risks.
“Human lawyers are good at dealing with difficult problems, while AI is very strong in retrieving information and checking and mending weak points,” Chen Yunzhou, a Zeda Law Firm lawyer who took part in the competition, toldThe program used in the competition is based on a deep learning model called Alice, short for Alibaba Collection of Encoder-decoders, created by the natural language processing unit of the Damo Academy, Alibaba’s science and technology research division.
Alibaba has said that AI is meant to speed up tedious, repetitive tasks and leave more time for humans to handle sophisticated legal work, but some places in China are already replacing court staff with machines.replaced clerks with AI assistants that could transcribe case notes, retrieve files and present digitised evidence. It is one of multiple ways courts in China have recently turned to hi-tech solutions, including livestreaming court hearings, offering mobile legal services, and using voice-activated robot assistants and virtual judges.by automating tasks that seemed inseparable from human grunt work not that long ago.