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Los Angeles courts may use AI to redact children’s sensitive information

This Jan. 23, 2023, image shows ChatGPT, which a New York attorney used to help craft a legal filing that was later found to include made-up cases. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

Los Angeles Superior Court may leverage artificial intelligence to help protect the personal information of minors, according to a report by Bloomberg Law.

As Maia Spoto reports, Accenture PLC has been contracted to provide AI that “will be used specifically to help read and identify characters and patterns in documents.”

That will replace the current system, which the Bloomberg report compared to “Microsoft Word’s function to find and replace names with information input by court staff.”

While the AI system is intended to handle the redactions, “Los Angeles Superior Court staff will review the redactions to ensure they are correct, the court said” according to Spoto’s report.

There is room for problems to arise when using AI in legal matters, however. In New York, an attorney had ChatGPT help him craft a filing, only for the court to discover later that some of the cases cited in the filing were made up.

Chinmayi Sharma, a Fordham University School of Law associate professor, told Spoto that if court employees trust AI too much and don’t provide proper oversight, there could be trouble ahead.

“If law firm associates are relying on AI made-up sources,” she said, “you can imagine how an overworked state court clerk may be tempted to assume the system was correct.”