Artificial intelligence is being deployed in many fields - to summarise reports, find job candidates and imagine skateboarding cats - but would you trust the technology to handle your divorce?
Thousands of Australian couples have taken the tech leap, putting their faith in an AI tool to draft personal property divisions, parenting plans and agreements, and court consent orders.
The technology, funded by the federal government, is estimated to have saved couples more than $80 million in legal and court fees since its launch.
Industry experts warn the tool must be carefully trained and constantly monitored to protect its users but, if administered correctly, they say it has the potential to remove some of the emotion from a difficult human experience.
The AI-powered separation tool, called Amica, re-entered the public spotlight at the Senate’s Adopting AI inquiry last week.
The tool was quietly launched in Australia in June 2020 with funding from the federal government, oversight from the South Australian government and development by Victorian firm Portable.
Jake Bonnici, from the Legal Services Commission of South Australia that administers the program, says Amica is designed to help couples who remain on speaking terms to divide their assets and organise parenting plans without spending money on lawyers.
Couples are asked to submit details such as their income, assets, property, superannuation, the length of their relationship, their children and their care, he says, for the software to determine a fair split.
“It takes into account your situation as best as it can, based on the information you feed it, and in the background the artificial intelligence determines from those parameters what a likely settlement would look like,” Mr Bonnici says.
“After the AI does its bit, it will calculate a percentage split for each of the parties.”
Unlike generative AI tools, Amica is trained in a restricted environment, Mr Bonnici says, and draws from decisions in other family court cases around Australia.
So far, the tool has been used to draft 10,200 divorce matters, including 2,200 property divisions, more than 500 parenting plans, and 415 court consent orders.
But the rulings provided by Amica are not legally binding.
Couples can use Amica’s determinations as a place to start negotiating, Mr Bonnici says, and its findings are checked by a family lawyer to guard against errors or bias.
“If the AI is out by a certain percentage or we don’t believe it has calculated it correctly, we inform both of the parties within a couple of days,” he adds.
“And if a couple can’t come up with a settlement, we allow them to extract that information and see a private lawyer.”
Amica also features restrictions to prevent one party claiming significantly more than it recommends and to identify bad language during negotiations.
“As soon as you start going on about the spoon collection and start swearing at party A or party B, it’s not conducive to a good outcome,” he says.
“We have a tone analysis over all the communication that occurs through Amica, just to keep everyone on track.”
To help individuals involved in more acrimonious break-ups, including violent situations, the government launched a second version of the AI tool, named Amica One, in January 2023.
The AI programs came under scrutiny at the federal Adopting AI inquiry on August 16, with Greens Senator David Shoebridge asking public servants about its data integrity, outcomes and potential risks.
Jenna Priestly, from the Attorney-General’s Department, told the inquiry the AI tool would not suit all individuals.
“I would say that it's best suited to couples who are still amicable and who wish to work out their arrangements relating to their children, property or finances between themselves,” she said.
“It's not intended for couples who have complex property or financial arrangements or where there's family violence.”
University of the Sunshine Coast computer science lecturer Dr Erica Mealy says with the right subjects and training, artificial intelligence technology could be uniquely suited to handling family court cases.
“It’s one of those areas where it’s very emotive so having a computer which is not able to read into the emotions might be more objective,” she explains.
“If you put a human in the system, a lawyer for either side will be necessarily biased... but if you can use this as a mediator, providing it’s been trained on quality data, I think it’s not a terrible use of AI.”
The AI tool, she says, will require strict rules to ensure fair outcomes, including regular retraining to keep up with case law, scrutiny of the data it uses, and human checks to guard against bias.
Dr Mealy also warns the AI tool should not be considered a one-stop divorce solution but says its guidance could provide useful guidance.
“We’d probably call it a decision support system because the idea is that it’s informing humans who go on to do something,” she says.
“That’s an important distinction from a fully autonomous system because you still have human oversight.”
