The need for lawyers is slowly becoming less

Artificial intelligence will support uokik

The AI will support UOKiK. The program will examine the content of contracts, which at the same time may raise some thoughts about whether this is not the beginning of the end for human lawyers.

AI will support UOKiK

As we read on the “Science in Poland” website, artificial intelligence will support the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection in examining contracts for the presence of offensive clauses. The program is already in production and its task is to verify contract templates, both those available on the Internet and those that people provide when sending notifications to the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection.

As explained by Dr. Jaroslav Protasevich, Director of the Information Processing Center at the National Research Institute

We each purchase goods and services, and unfortunately we often do not have time to check the terms of the contract. Now artificial intelligence is coming to our aid. Thanks to our tool, an employee of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection will be able to quickly check the provisions of the contract, even before a possible consumer complaint is filed.

It was OPI PIB that won the relevant competition and created the software.

The National Research Institute has already developed many tools based on Artificial intelligence. They deal with, inter alia, recognizing plagiarism, diagnosing tumors or reading emotions in texts.

How is the program supposed to work?

Detailed information on the mechanisms underlying the project has not been provided, but it can be assumed that the program will be somewhat smarter comparison of the content of contracts using a database of offending clauses. I doubt that the program will be able to evaluate the content of the contract on its own based on the general premises of civil law. However, just a comparison of word combinations is not useless: the database of prohibited sentences is more and more comprehensive.

Are these tools the first step in replacing lawyers with computers? of course not. These types of projects are intended to facilitate people’s work, especially since law (in a sense) is a social phenomenon created by people and for people’s needs.

There is no need to be afraid of applying new technologies, especially since their use will only benefit society. Automatically checking contracts for prohibited clauses is a very good project. Thanks to this, the UOKiK sieve can pass, for example, regulations that, with only human participation, may not have been examined by the office.

We can expect many such solutions in the near future. The development of artificial intelligence is progressing, and the law in this area is developing very efficiently (at the level of the European Union). It is also worth noting that Poland, as a country, eagerly looks at new technologies. Therefore, since there are opportunities, as well as some needs, the use of innovations seems natural and possibly necessary.