I was pretty chuffed to be the very first Australian attorney invited by IP Australia to review the new AI chat bot they are developing.
The goal of the AI chat bot is to educate Australian business owners about their IP rights, and give them some general information about how they might respond when encountering 3rd party infringement or receiving a letter of demand.
The AI chat bot is still in prototype stage, so it’s not possible to go and try use it yourself yet.
But, when it is released to the public, I encourage you to have a play around and see what you think.
Something that struck me about it was how tailored the environment is (the AI chat bot is carefully fed the most meticulously crafted content: only things that have been vetted and approved for IP Australia’s website). And yet, still, during the exploration we made of it today, the user is not always prompted to put in all the relevant facts, so the answers might be quite different than they would have been if those facts had been provided. Like all AI, the output is only as good as the input. And some of the answers are not complete or take a different flavour than what IP Australia would intend. So, they really need to be reviewed and refined by an IP attorney.
Therefore, even the mostly carefully curated, trained AI chat bot struggles to provide the nuanced and complete advice of an IP specialist.
I know IP Australia will iron out the issues, and I look forward to being involved in the testing of future iterations. I am sure when it rolls out it will be a valuable source of information for many people. Rather than Googling their IP questions, they can at least go to IP Australia’s AI chat bot as a more reliable source of Australian IP information.
But no matter how many iterations I test, I get the feeling that the AI chat bot will not, and that it simply cannot, replace the value of an experienced IP professional.
So, use the AI bots and other generalists as a resource, sure. But when it is time to take action, I cannot emphasise enough, the importance of checking that the source/person from whom you are seeking your advice is a registered trade marks attorney (dual qualified as a solicitor if the matter is a dispute requiring negotiation, a trust account for deposit of settlement moneys, and the drafting of complex co-existence agreement, deed of release or other settlement agreements). For a list of registered trade marks attorneys in Australia, visit the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board (TTIPAB) at https://lnkd.in/gDpDbbju.
Finally, kudos to IP Australia for all they do to support and educate IP rights holders. Their continual effort and introduction of new initiatives such as this AI chat bot is a credit to them.
Trade mark experts in Australian and international trade mark matters