 post this evening for the It's Time for Responsible Change episode. Chuck Frumpton, who is normally here, has taken the evening off, and it's my pleasure to be with you to talk about artificial intelligence in the next frontier. With us tonight, we have an amazing panel. I want to start first with our newest member, and that is, I want to introduce to you Mawanda Williams Griffin, who is the owner of Resolve It. Our ADR services that is alternative to dispute resolution services incorporated based in Jackson, Mississippi. And Mawanda is a member of the Academy of Port appointing mutuals, but that's also this evening. We have Lorraine Delacorta, who is based in Rhode Island, and she is the owner of the Resolution Collaborative. Some of you may have seen this gentleman that I'm about to introduce before. I'm very excited. It's my first time actually being on a panel with them. So, trying to control my eagerness. Daniel Rainey with Holistic Solutions based in Northern Virginia. And what I, how I know Daniel, and we'll talk about it a little bit later is in another capacity, but what I want to bring forth in this presentation is that Daniel is also a fellow with the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. And last, but certainly not least, is my dear friend, Larry Bridge Smith, who is from the Nashville metropolitan area, Tennessee, and he is the executive director of the Gardvale Technologies Foundation. So why are we here this evening? And I'm going to give this as a backdrop. There's a recent story regarding a few research centers, research centers headline was Americans are increasingly cautious about the growing role of artificial intelligence in their lives generally. Taking a little closer look, we find out that few research conducted a survey between July 31st and August 6th of 2023, this year, not that long ago. And of those who were responding to the survey, 52% are more concerned and excited about artificial intelligence in daily life compared to just 10%, just 10% who say they are more excited than concerned. 36% feel a mix of excitement and concern. So we've got this amazing panel here. I'm going to start with the first question we artificial intelligence is all over the news. What is it Larry Bridge Smith? What is artificial intelligence? A great question to ask, but it can only be answered when I ask one in return and that is, well, which artificial intelligence are you talking about? There are probably close to 100 different applications of artificial intelligence and there's nothing new about the phrase back in 1956. Some of us were we once at that time, but John Danforth, the professor of math at Dartmouth said artificial intelligence is when any machine does something that humans are accustomed to doing. So that's a pretty broad definition, but we know that in our world, artificial intelligence has become so embedded in everything we do. From Siri to Alexa to Amazon, letting us know what the next book we want to buy is, we don't even realize how deeply embedded AI is in our life. However, I think today on the 30th of November 2023, most people are focused on an event that occurred exactly a year ago. When chat GPT came on the scene and one of those types of artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence became the topic of conversation. So if that's what we're talking about, there are plenty of things to discuss, but artificial intelligence is not going to go away. The question is, how are we going to use it most beneficially? And how do we avoid the risks that any of those applications might bring? I'm speaking about using it. LaWanda, I know that you are a practicing attorney and part of your work has been in the past year specifically incorporating artificial intelligence into your work. Would you share what you're doing? Because I think this is a different take than what we hear in the news about an amicus brief that's been written or someone else putting together documentation that is false. And you're using it in a way that, you know what, I won't give your story away. I'll let you take it. Well, I mean, I tell people who will listen that for me, I don't think of, I never thought of AI as like the trendy buzzword and as Larry, you know, so eloquently put it that it's been in our society for quite some time now. And I look at it as a critical ally to my business to help my client. I mean, because just three, two years ago, I'm fifting through mountains of data, you know, and that takes an enormous amount of time to do that. And so when AI came along specifically chat GPT and some of the other applications, I'm able to streamline operations that takes me, you know, a very short amount of time where at first it would, you know, take me day, you know, to sit through a lot of the information. And it enables me to personalize the customer experience now, because I'm able to devote that time that I didn't have to really connect with my client in a much, much better way. And, and it has proven to, like I said, to be an ally to me. And I don't look at it as something that is harmful. Now, of course, when chat GPT came about and came on the scene, I was intrigued instead of skeptical. And that's how I approach a lot of new information. I'm intrigued, first of all, and then, you know, and when I do my due diligence to research it more, then I come away with an opinion whether or not it will, you know, help or harm me and my client. Also, on the other hand, though, we have to keep in mind the ethical questions and concerns about utilizing artificial intelligence and of course chat GPT. And I encourage, you know, my colleague, when you give chat GPT a prompt and it responds, double check, just like we, I mean, I'm old school, proofread, go back and, you know, make sure that your, you know, case law that it gave you is accurate. And we have seen where, you know, some attorneys, I guess, were very, very, they were very excited about it, and didn't want to take that extra step and ensure that they were given the correct information. So with any new thing, you know, I just encourage, you know, I will, what I always do is I look at it and see how it can help me and those things that can help me, you know, that's what I run with and that's what I employ and in servicing my client. And, but I look at it also with, you know, a careful eye regarding those ethical, you know, issues that it raises as an attorney. So, I hope that answered your question. It did. It did. And it opens the door to pass the baton to Daniel because as I indicated earlier, he's with an organization that's been looking at technology and online dispute resolution, which for many practitioners, they believe started in 2020. And the fact of the matter is online dispute resolution has been around for well over a decade, actually two decades. Daniel, how is the the advent of the phenomenal growth of artificial intelligence, changing the discussion regarding online dispute resolution and the new frontiers for online dispute resolution. Yeah, I'll just, I'll echo what Larry said a while ago and that is that we've been using forms of what we might call artificial intelligence for quite a long time. The difference now and the thing that we're looking at is here to for we didn't have the computer, literally the computing power to jump to use the generative predictive technologies that are coming along. But if you look at what eBay was doing back in the 1990s and mid 2000s, we were dealing with millions of cases in a decision tree in a bounded universe, only so many things can go wrong, only so many things you can do to fix it. The difference now is that the generative technology that's coming along is able to operate in a relatively unbounded universe, so it can handle much more complicated issues. What I what I think about this in terms of practitioners, I said I don't think it will be the practitioners who push the use of artificial intelligence in dispute resolution systems. If we look at the history of how things have happened in terms of technology development and adoption. It is the price is the customers, it's the clients, the parties who see the benefit of what we can offer through artificial intelligence. And then the practitioners are the ones who are holding back and saying, you know, we don't want to do this. We're scared about doing it. I think it's going to be a very interesting time that we're moving into currently working on a book with a couple of my colleagues on guardrail. First of all, just to say that controlling artificial intelligence like controlling any other technology, controlling it completely is a losing game. The fears that people have are not completely unfounded. Can artificial intelligence create things that look real that are not real? Absolutely it can do that. Can artificial intelligence, if you give it the license and take it, take the person out of the loop, can it decide to bomb somebody without having to talk to a person about bombing them? Well, yeah, I can do that and probably will do that at some point. So the fears are not, they're not crazy fears. But much more what we have to think about is what's the usefulness and argument that we're trying to make and the work that I'm doing right now is that legislation and regulation. Probably we're not going to work by itself because it's hard to produce. It's generally behind the curve and it's very hard to change once you create it. Standards approaches by themselves probably won't work because they take longer to develop and they have to be universally accepted. And so I think what we're looking at in the short term at least for practitioners is there are people who want to use the technology in an ethical manner. And so organizations like NCTDR and iCoder and the ABE and all these other organizations that deal with this few resolution that produce some kind of ethical guidelines for use are going to play a major role in the short term. And they're going to tell us if we want to use it ethically, that's where we're going to find out how to use it ethically. And then we have to worry about how do we deal with the other part of it later on, but I'm excited about it as I think most of us are. And I think if you look at what the parties will see as the usefulness of the information that we can get from AI, they're the ones who are going to push it. You know, right now there's there's at law in the UK that is using artificial intelligence to help with arbitration. There's next level mediation that has AI in the loop on mediation. There are all sorts of things that are going on where we're we're injecting as part of our process as part of our practice. The artificial intelligence to help us do functions that we've always done and maybe do them a little bit better. One last quick example, and then I'll shut up. So if if I'm a mediator has been working for decades, and I've done hundreds, let's say I'm due to divorce mediation, I've done hundreds of divorce mediation cases. When people come and sit down with me and I'm the mediator between these individuals, I am going to have an opinion about where they're headed because I've got decades of experience. I've seen it a hundred times before. So I'm going to have in my mind an idea of where they're headed. If I can have an artificial intelligence program that sees millions of divorces over decades of time, they can tell me what it looks like the position that we're in where we're headed might be. I don't see ethnically a difference between the two of those things. How you use them is the ethical issue. If I think I know where we're going as a mediator and I push my clients there, I have a problem with that. If I use the AI to give me ideas and I push those ideas on my clients, I have a problem with that. But if it's information that I have that informs the way I discuss things with the parties who are in front of me, we've been doing that forever. We do it as human being. All we're doing now is giving ourselves a little bit more punch when we have the information. Larry, I know you wanted to add something. I'm going to say this for listeners who heard what Daniel said. He said, oh, it sounded like an acronym and it was. He said, I code her and I want to tell you what that means. That means international counsel for online dispute resolution Larry. I'm sorry, Daniel is a member. I am as well. Larry, I'm going to pass it to you because there's something that you wanted to share and I'm going to be quiet. Well, I don't want to take undue time, but I wanted to follow up on something that Daniel said and remind us all that any innovation, particularly technology innovations have always come with legitimate concerns about misuse. Would it surprise you to know that I can cite an ethics opinion from the ABA that cautioned lawyers against using cell phones. I can find a federal judge who outlawed the use of email. So we look at those things and we find the ludicrousness of that because guardrails. To Dan's perspective, have been imposed on these technologies and the potential abuses and the potential harms have been limited by the. Expert use and the imposition of these limits on these technologies, it will be no different with generative AI. It will become increasingly accountable, increasingly transparent. Whether it's by regulation or just by industry standards. And therefore we shouldn't be the fear. We shouldn't be afraid we should be engaged in helping generative AI meet its potential. Absolutely. Speaking of potential. Lorraine, you're not only the owner of the resolution collaborative, which are a law professor and artificial intelligence in the academic community has made me feel a bit uncomfortable. How are you feeling about using AI yourself as an instructor, but you're in students and what work product they may present. Yeah, so I was I'll confess initially pretty skeptical. I mean, I heard a lot about, you know, students, you know, using chat GPT to do papers and it was going to make them not. You know, do the kind of research they needed to do to really learn the law. But as I get more familiar and I listen to people like that around this panel tonight, I just see so much opportunity. I see it from a access to justice perspective. So a lot of people don't have access to our services. Right. They can't afford our services as mediators and as arbitrators as practitioners. And I think this presents some real opportunity for us to work super efficiently build efficiencies. I see it as a path along savings to people. I think of it in terms of eliminating some language barriers that exist when we do some of this work. I see it as opportunities to balance power in some circumstances, you know, mediators. Sometimes when they're challenged to balance power in a room, there can be a perception of either, you know, non neutrality or advocacy. So I see some potential there. I mean, in terms of students, I can remember as a law student, you know, having to sit for hours and hours and hours in a library. You know, pouring over old books. I think students have the opportunity now to work much more efficiently. They have everything at their fingertips. They can look at, you know, case law from all over the place really quickly. And, and, you know, spend more time with engaging the material than looking for it. So those are just a few of the ways that I see this really being a benefit. And I'm going to come back as I also realize that you are the co-chair of the American Bar Association sections, public disputes and consensus building committee. And the word on the street is that there's a newsletter coming out for your committee this month. And the focus is on AI and consensus building. Do you want to elaborate on that? And I'm interested in full disclosure. Larry Britsmith is one of the contributors to that newsletter. And we have a fabulous editor of that newsletter who happens to also be hosting this program. Yeah, and I encourage everybody to read the newsletter. I mean, the authors, we have a phenomenal and they come at it from all different perspectives, but we really want to think about how to leverage some of the tools in public disputes and consensus building. I mean, we think about it in terms of how to do stakeholder analysis. Right. I mean, that's, you know, those are just a few little previews. But yeah, I'd like, I'd like Larry to really, if he would be willing to talk a little bit about the article, that would be great. I'm delighted and honored to have been able to be asked. And so thank you for allowing that. But the point I think that we're all striving to reach is how do we do all of our jobs better? And I want to emphasize better, faster and cheaper because when we talk about access to justice, it's the cost of the access to the experts that have just denied vast majorities, probably well over 90% of individuals who need legal assistance from acquiring it. Well, can't we do better than that? And tools like generative AI, it's not just chat GBT, there are hosts of different tools that are now available, more coming out all the time that can help us analyze large quantities of data. And if we don't treat it like pixie dust, and when we continue to use the due diligence, it's already been referenced as we would in any case, we would never put a legal assistance brief before the United States Supreme Court, we'd breached our ethical duties to do so. Same with generative AI, it's a, it's an assistant. And therefore we can do all of these kinds of things better faster and cheaper. When we bring these tools to the table. And I think of public interest dispute resolution is some of the most important work to be done. So, I'm thrilled to know that people like yourselves are using these generative AI tools to help you do that job better, we'll all benefit from it. So, I make a really quick comment. Absolutely. It is related to what you're talking about here and that is, in order for us as practitioners to use the technology wisely and to use it well, we have to have some understanding of it. And one of the things that I have been an advocate of and that I push for every time I do one of these presentation is when we do continually legal education for attorneys when we do mediation training when we do any of the things that we do to bring people into our profession and to maintain their competence and profession, we have got to begin building it. How do you deal? How do you understand and know what AI is good and how to use it? Because right now anyway, I think for the foreseeable future, the utility of AI is driven by the data set on which is trained. And it's not simple, but it's also not that difficult to understand as a practitioner, but we need to make a conscious effort to train the people who are going to use it and how to evaluate its effectiveness and its usefulness. I wholeheartedly agree with what you just said. I think it should be part of every law school curriculum. I can speak to that as a professor too. I'm not an academic, I'm a pracidemic, but I teach mediation at Vanderbilt Law School and this term for the first time, I brought generative AI into the training, helping the students understand its weaknesses as well as its strengths and giving them the experience of using it for the purpose of being better mediation advocates and better impartial parties seeking to solve problems and the results in my view were phenomenal. These are digital natives and helping them use it wisely and well is going to make the whole process of dispute resolution much more effective. Any thoughts on this topic? Well, I did, I was thinking about when Lorraine was talking about AI and consensus building processes and I wanted to give her thoughts on leveraging AI and what ways can we leverage AI to enhance consensus building, especially in those complex situations involving diverse stakeholders with varying perspectives. How do you see that, how do you think that we can leverage AI in that way to accomplish that? I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination. I've had some fantasies in my mind of how it could be used and one of them is just a way to gather a lot of data, a lot of opinion, a lot of concerns, interest from various stakeholders and to be able to get that information gathered very quickly and then use it to brainstorm solutions that would meet various interests, right? So we try to do that as consensus builders. It's often a very slow process. Right. We don't have the luxury of time to gather all of that information to talk to as many people as we can and I think that's a way where I see AI could really be effective in doing that and shortening that timeframe and getting as many perspectives in the mix as possible, as well as kind of the brains, you know, kind of short circuiting the brainstorming and coming up with here's some potential options that might meet multiple interests. That's my little fantasy world right now. Well, no, that's quite possible Lorraine though. Quick, quick example, back when email was relatively new. I was working as a consultant with the Department of Agriculture and they were doing, they wanted to do a new organic standard. And so they said, well, gee, now an email is out there and let's use email and people don't have to write to us. They can send us an email and tell us what they think. Within a week, they had a million emails. Now, when you start looking for the interests that underlie those emails and you're doing it as a human being, you have to make some pretty broad generic categories. If you give that to an AI program, it can tell you underneath the surface where there are some unlikely commonalities and where things are connected where you might not see them if you're doing that as a person sitting with a case of Red Bull in a conference room some weekend. And so there's some obvious ways that it helps in using large data sets and large multi-party disputes. It's going to be phenomenal in the area. In the last two minutes that we have left and this has been a rich dialogue, so I feel guilty kind of bringing this to a close, but I want to ask each of you, a year from now, where will we be from your perspective and this dialogue regarding artificial intelligence and its use. Well, I think by that time we will have seen the regulatory and statutory intrusion and explanation of what some of those limitations on generative AI in particular need to have. So we're going to be dealing with a much more regulated use and therefore I think we will benefit from that. I think a year from now, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, one of the things that I hope to see a year from now is increased integration in everyday life. That's what I really hope to see that it will be ingrained in daily activities and just on a more personal and not just professional level. It would be quite interesting to see how everyday people utilize something like AI in their everyday lives because if you think about it, I mean, when is the iPhone breakout and everybody was using the blackberry and then when the iPhone came about and everybody was like, what is this? What do we do with this? How do we work it? How do we learn to use it? And now it's a part of most everyone's daily lives, their iPhone. And so it's interesting to see how AI will be integrated in everyday life a year from now. I'm sorry, I went over time. Daniel. Well, I think a year from now, we're going to see the development of more specific AI programs, more specific generative predictive AI programs for particular venues. So if you're an arbitrator or you're a mediator or you do whatever your niche happens to be, instead of having to rely on general generative predictive AI, there's going to be more opportunity for you to invest in a very targeted data set that is directly related to the work that you do. I'm excited about that, Daniel. I want to thank each of our panelists for their thoughts, perspectives, and their visions for the future of artificial intelligence. Again, Chuck Compton allowed me to be the guest host this evening. He will be back with you. I believe he's coming back on the 14th of December. I'm going to close out this session with a description from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This description of artificial intelligence encapsulates what we heard this evening. And for those of you that are part of that 52% that are concerned, take a listen to this. Artificial intelligence, AI, is rapidly transforming our world. Remarkable surges and AI capabilities have led to a wide range of innovations, including autonomous vehicles and connected internet of things devices in our home. AI is even contributing to the development of a brain controlled robotic arm that can help paralyze person feel again through complex direct human brain interfaces. These new AI enabled systems are revolutionizing and benefiting nearly all aspects of our society and economy. Everything from commerce and healthcare, transportation and cybersecurity. But the development and use of the new technologies it brings are not about technical challenges and risks. Again, thank you all for being here and hope to have you back on another session of its time for responsible change. Thank you, Tina. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you.