Wintersteiger: Big fall in click-throughs
Google AI overviews are having a “major detrimental impact” on the efforts of legal advice agencies to get good information out to consumers, MPs were told this week.
Dr Lisa Wintersteiger, chief executive of free legal information website Advicenow, called for a “sector-wide response” to the issue “just as the health sector is doing – at speed”.
Speaking to the justice select committee in an evidence session for its inquiry into access to justice, Dr Wintersteiger explained that Google’s AI overviews could be “an opportunity to synthesize great information of the highest quality so that users get to their law centre or to ourselves, or to the better bits of gov.uk”.
However, “the reality is that we’re seeing a huge decline in click-throughs, 15-30%, depending on the provider, people are not always being sent to localised provision”.
In healthcare, for example, AI overviews could give inaccurate information on cancer, she went on.
“It has hit us at such a speed that anything else we’re doing on tech and development has had to pause completely. Our good content is no longer being made available because we are being absolutely swamped, particularly by Google AI.
“We need to talk to them. There needs to be a sector-wide response and sector-wide advocacy.”
Liz Bayram, chief executive of AdviceUK, which supports almost 700 member organisations, told MPs that the challenge for the sector was “immense”, as younger users moved from internet searches to “answer pathways”.
AdviceUK was in the “very early stages” of working with an organisation which could mean that AI became “the first person to ask questions of the advice seeker”.
Future models of AI “could understand human emotion and body language” and the advice sector was “moving in the direction of AI”.
Some members were already using it to help them reduce administration, triage enquiries and plan next steps, meaning they were spending “more time with clients”.
However, although 40% of AdviceUK members were “keen to consider use of AI”, only 4% had actually done it, because the “time and money is not there”.
Dr Philip Drake, director of the Manchester Justice Hub, said one of the problems with AI was that it extracted information from websites, but “it doesn’t know what is right or wrong”.
He went on: “If AI could recognise what is good law and what isn’t, that would be very useful.”
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan, head of policy and profile at the Law Centres Network, said the problem was not a lack of information online, but “how findable, how accurate and how trustworthy” it was.
He said the Ministry of Justice launched an online tool several years ago to help people understand what to do if they encountered housing disrepair in a rented home.
“It tells me options, but not ‘where do I start’? It is not designed with the particular needs of advice seekers in mind.”
He added that HM Courts and Tribunals Service had invited regional advice agencies to come in and help design services, and “a lot more” could be done in that way.
On technology more generally, Dr Wintersteiger said she was “disappointed” that LawTechUK, the government-backed programme to promote the legal tech sector, had not “made its way” into the advice sector.
There had been “pots” of money available, which though not large, could have made “a huge difference”.
“I know the minister is keen to get to the advice sector so we can get on with our research and development and meet the need that is out there.”
Leave a Comment