Is Google’s Gemini Your Ticket to Self-Representation?

If you are watching television over the holiday weekend you saw advertisements for Google’s late August entry into the artificial intelligence market. You can converse with Gemini and often secure less hostile responses than you might otherwise get from your wife and kids. And, unlike either of those its chatbot is actually doing research in preparation for its response. Hey, so if your ex is taking you to court next week for underpaying your support or delivering the kids a day late after Labor Day, why not let Chat GPT or Gemini be your counsel for the day?

The price is right compared to a live attorney and if the stakes are low you may be on to something. People don’t go to jail for custody contempt unless they have the kids and are refusing to give them back. The remedies are unusually lame. But, if you have not been paying your support and a judge decides you have the present ability to pay, you and your phone might be working on how to get out of jail from inside a cell; that’s if they let you keep your phone while in the cooler.

Meanwhile, while artificial intelligence is getting smarter each day, it does make some pretty big errors. Earlier this month a user of Grok, Elon Musk’s entry in the AI wars, inquired who was the worst spreader of misinformation. The response was none other than Elon Musk. Many people might agree with that conclusion but it’s not one that you would want to employ within the executive suite at Grok or its corporate sponsor “X” (yes, formerly Twitter). Last Spring my former firm’s chief artificial intelligence lawyer tried out ChatGPT with a question about common law marriage in Pennsylvania. The answer was quick and accurate unless you claim to have been common law married before 2005. Then the answer was completely incorrect. AI may have solved that problem in the past 8 months but one of the issues that AI has to contend with is changes in the law. Ask about whether parents have an obligation to support adult children in Pennsylvania and AI is going to encounter dozens of cases discussing the nature and extent of the obligation including a statute that is still on the books. 23 Pa.C.S. 4327. But the Supreme Court decided in 1995 that the statute was unconstitutional. Ask whether you can deduct alimony you might have to pay your former spouse and there is law going back to 1920 indicating that it is. Alas, the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act upended that tradition by abandoning it except for alimony orders in place before January 1,  2019.

So, if you need a quick answer to impress friends and family at holiday gatherings artificial intelligence may be suitable. But if significant money or your liberty (i.e., incarceration for contempt) are at stake, you probably need to limit your “chats” to preliminary research subject to confirmation by living lawyers.