What are the good and bad sides of using AI?

We’ve thought long and hard about using artificial intelligence (or “AI”) in this project.

Some of the good sides are:

1. We can do this project at all! New Zealand has a lot of laws, and they are all quite long and hard to understand. By using AI, we can do something that would take people years and years to do. By the time they finished, the laws might have all changed again.
2. We can help people understand important information. We haven’t found any other websites that can explain the law simply, so we think it’s useful to help people understand New Zealand laws.
3. We can update things easily. If the law changes (or we realise we can create better plain language) it only takes us a few hours to update things.
4. AI knows a lot about a lot of different things. There are many different laws, and AI is pretty good at understanding them all. If we got humans to do this work we’d need lots of different people, and a lot of money.

Some of the bad sides are:

1. Using AI uses a lot of energy. Everything we do uses a bit of energy, but AI can use quite a lot. All of that energy can make climate change a little bit worse, so this is something we have to think about.
2. AI isn’t perfect. AI knows a lot about a lot of things, but there are lots of things it doesn’t know. Sometimes AI pretends it knows something when it doesn’t, and can lie without anyone realising. This is why this site isn’t as good as someone who knows a lot about New Zealand laws.
3. We don’t know where AI gets all its information from. It’s impossible to know where AI “learns” things from. We can guess it’s read Wikipedia, and thousands of other websites. But we’ll never really know exactly where its learnt things, and if those websites wanted the AI to read them in the first place.

Overall, for this project, we think that the good sides are more than the bad sides. We hope that it’s useful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to share, please send us a message!