Natural Language Processing Group

Lawmakers all over the world have started to draft new regulations for Artificial Intelligence (AI). While the European Union is currently leading the way with its AI Act, many other legislators will follow and already positioned themselves with white papers and other publications. This commentary argues that “Artificial Intelligence”, including Generative AI, should not be used as a regulatory category. Not because there is no potential for harm from AI systems and not because AI systems should not be regulated, but because “Artificial Intelligence” is a vaguely defined label that is neither suitable nor necessary for comprehensive regulation of technological risks. Instead of regulating a particular set of approaches and algorithms, lawmakers should focus and double down on regulating high-risk applications of software, independent of whether it is labelled as AI or not.

Legal tasks and datasets are often used as benchmarks for the capabilities of language models. However, openly available annotated datasets are rare. In this paper, we introduce AGB-DE, a corpus of 3,764 clauses from German consumer contracts that have been annotated and legally assessed by legal experts. Together with the data, we present a first baseline for the task of detecting potentially void clauses, comparing the performance of an SVM baseline with three fine-tuned open language models and the performance of GPT-3.5. Our results show the challenging nature of the task, with no approach exceeding an F1-score of 0.54. While the fine-tuned models often performed better with regard to precision, GPT-3.5 outperformed the other approaches with regard to recall. An analysis of the errors indicates that one of the main challenges could be the correct interpretation of complex clauses, rather than the decision boundaries of what is permissible and what is not.

The increased quality and human-likeness of AI generated texts has resulted in a rising demand for neural text detectors, i.e. software that is able to detect whether a text was written by a human or generated by an AI. Such tools are often used in contexts where the use of AI is restricted or completely prohibited, e.g. in educational contexts. It is, therefore, important for the effectiveness of such tools that they are robust towards deliberate attempts to hide the fact that a text was generated by an AI. In this article, we investigate a broad range of adversarial attacks in English texts with six different neural text detectors, including commercial and research tools. While the results show that no detector is completely invulnerable to adversarial attacks, the latest generation of commercial detectors proved to be very robust and not significantly influenced by most of the evaluated attack strategies.

Legal documents, like contracts or laws, are subject to interpretation. Different people can have different interpretations of the very same document. Large parts of judicial branches all over the world are concerned with settling disagreements that arise, in part, from these different interpretations. In this context, it only seems natural that during the annotation of legal machine learning data sets, disagreement, how to report it, and how to handle it should play an important role. This article presents an analysis of the current state-of-the-art in the annotation of legal machine learning data sets. The results of the analysis show that all of the analysed data sets remove all traces of disagreement, instead of trying to utilise the information that might be contained in conflicting annotations. Additionally, the publications introducing the data sets often do provide little information about the process that derives the “gold standard” from the initial annotations, often making it difficult to judge the reliability of the annotation process. Based on the state-of-the-art, the article provides easily implementable suggestions on how to improve the handling and reporting of disagreement in the annotation of legal machine learning data sets.