Siri Is My Client: a First Look at Artificial Intelligence and Legal Issues
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Citation | Vol. 52 No. 4 Pg. 0006 |
| Pages | 0006 |
| Publication year | 2012 |
2012 Winter, Pg. 6. SIRI IS MY CLIENT: A First Look at Artificial Intelligence and Legal Issues
Volume 52, No. 4
Winter 2012
INTRODUCTION
For many people, artificial intelligence ("AI") is HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, KIT from Knight Rider, Data from Star Trek, or Haley Joel Osment from (appropriately) A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In light of this image, AI is frequently relegated to the science fiction section of Netflix and forgotten.
But that type of AI only represents one kind - strong AI, meaning AI that matches or exceeds human intelligence and that can therefore solve any problem and interact in any social situation much like a person would. And that type of AI is pure fiction at this point. However, weak AI is another matter altogether. Weak AI only recreates elements of human intelligence in a computer. We interact with weak AI all the time - Google, Global Positioning System ("GPS")(fn1), video games, etc. Any machine or software that is able to follow simple rules to replicate human intelligence qualifies.
Recently, we have seen rapid advances in weak AI. Famous examples of this development are Deep Blue, the chess master machine, and Watson, the Jeopardy master machine. But, in a sense, those examples are just as fantastical as HAL and KIT. Hardly anyone interacts with machines like that.
The first major mass market product to change that is Siri, the "intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking."(fn2) Siri is the first commercially available, advanced weak AI. By "advanced weak AI," I mean weak AI that can recreate elements of human intelligence through human-like interaction.(fn3) This distinguishes it from other popular examples of weak AI like Google - in their natural setting, humans don't type questions and requests to each other.(fn4)
This article looks at a few of the legal issues related to Siri, focusing on intellectual property and liability issues. What happens when Siri creates something new that has commercial value? What happens when reliance on a Siri search results in property or bodily damage? With the pending developments in weak AI, which I'll address in this article as well, the questions introduced by Siri will only grow in prominence and importance. But first, it is useful to have a better idea of what Siri is and does.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SIRI
Like the internet and GPS, Siri is the product of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Defense Department agency that developments new technologies. In 2003, DARPA entered into an agreement with SRI International, a research group in Menlo Park California, to research and develop a "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."(fn5)
In 2007, SRI incorporated a separate entity, Siri, Inc., to develop a commercial application for the AI developed in the DARPA project.(fn6) Siri, Inc. received venture capital backing and eventually released a virtual personal assistant application for the iPhone in February 2010.(fn7) In April 2010, Apple, Inc. bought Siri, Inc.(fn8) When Apple released the iPhone 4S in October 2011, Siri was pre-installed as an all-purpose virtual assistant, not merely as an app.
Siri is not just a virtual personal assistant. It has both speech input and speech output. Users can speak to it and receive spoken responses. The extent of its interaction with the iPhone 4S and the Internet is fairly extensive. Ask Siri about the weather, and Siri will give you a short summary of the weather forecast where you're located. Ask Siri to tell your husband you are running late, and Siri will send a text message. Ask Siri to schedule lunch with your mom next Friday, and Siri will update your calendar and give you verbal confirmation. Siri does not process speech input solely on your phone. Rather, the software send commands through a remote server, so it is necessary for users to be connected to Wi-Fi or carrier service (Verizon, ATandT, etc.).(fn9)
The actual process Siri uses to translate your words into action -"breath to bytes" - represents an impressive achievement of internet technology. Smart Planet described how Siri responds to a user request to send a text to "Erica:"
The sounds of your speech were immediately encoded into a compact digital form that preserves its information.
The signal from your connected phone was relayed wirelessly through a nearby cell tower and through a series of land lines back to your Internet Service Provider where it then communicated with a server in the cloud, loaded with a series of models honed to comprehend language.
Simultaneously, your speech was evaluated locally, on your device. A recognizer installed on your phone communicates with that server in the cloud to gauge whether the command can be best handled locally-such as if you had asked it to play a song on your phone -or if it must connect to the network for further assistance. (If the local recognizer deems its model sufficient to process your speech, it tells the server in the cloud that it is no longer needed: "Thanks very much, we're OK here.")
The server compares your speech against a statistical model to estimate, based on the sounds you spoke and the order in which you spoke them, what letters might constitute it. (At the same time, the local recognizer compares your speech to an abridged version of that statistical model.) For both, the highest-probability estimates get the go-ahead.
Based on these opinions, your speech - now understood as a series of vowels and consonants-is then run through a language model, which estimates the words that your speech is comprised of. Given a sufficient level of confidence, the computer then creates a candidate list of interpretations for what the sequence of words in your speech might mean.
If there is enough confidence in this result, and there is - the computer determines that your intent is to send an SMS, Erica Olssen is your addressee (and therefore her contact information should be pulled from your phone's contact list) and the rest is your actual note to her - your text message magically appears on screen, no hands necessary. If your speech is too ambiguous at any point during the...
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