NewsLII News | November 26, 2024
Learning from keeping the law free for all
Frequently over the past few years we’ve become accustomed to answering questions about how artificial intelligence affects our work: what if everyone gets their answers from somewhere else that consumes our information — and no one ever uses the LII website any more?
This isn’t as new a question as you might think — LII has been answering it at least since Wikipedia started up in the early 2000s. At least for now, our answer continues to be the same: our work serves the public regardless of how many intermediaries use and present it to them. What we learn from their use of our work helps us improve and advance for the benefit of all. Your support makes that possible.
GIVE NOW 
About a year and a half ago, the big technology analytics platform we were using was superseded by a new one. This shift was more disruptive than we would have liked, but in hindsight, it helped us break out of a rut. We’d become inured to the overwhelming influence of the largest search engines on how we viewed the use of our website. And the way the information had been presented tempted us to focus on the “top 10” (with a dash of “trending”), which at best reassured us that topics in the news still drove curious readers to relevant content on our site.
The analytics platform shift changed all that. The need to rebuild our reports piqued our curiosity and supported rapid exploration of how users interact with our website. Combined with the need to tweak our technology to address a massive increase in AI-driven crawler traffic, we came to discover that the new AI engine referrals had a lot to tell us about what we publish, how it was being used, and most importantly, how it might be used in the future. We started thinking of artificial intelligence services as if they were consultants, each with their own clientele, which in turn represented a wide variety of information needs.
Instead of the bland hit-parade-plus-in-the-news information stream, we suddenly saw specific questions for which our content was cited by particular generative AI chatbots. One chatbot surfaced content like the page in the Congressional Research Service’s US Constitution Annotated on Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances; the New York State Regulations on internal audit requirements for insurance companies; or a section of the Code of Federal Regulations regarding a particular food additive. Another AI focused disproportionately on legal theory and international human rights law. Yet another highlighted banking and securities regulations. Each of these, in turn, suggested potential pathways through our content that we might otherwise never have noticed.
At a time when publishers have existential concerns about the reuse of their data and how they might be compensated for it, we feel exceptionally fortunate to have the breathing room to learn from the way in which content we’ve published openly for more than three decades aligns with the questions people are asking of the best-resourced, most cutting-edge AI services in the world. The broad base of donations that supporters like you have provided enables us to continue to offer free, reliable, accessible, unbiased information that benefits from experimentation both within and also far beyond our group.
Please consider making a donation today.
From of us at LII, thank you for your support.