The legal status of AI chats and Google docs
Do you think they are private?
Whether one can get into legal trouble for AI chats is something to which we should be paying attention. The AI platforms have been refreshingly honest about their right to share AI chats with third parties, which include authorities.
In a recent piece of news (link), a federal judge ruled that attorney-client privilege does not extend to someone's chats with an AI chatbot even if they are preparation for talking to one's lawyers. This decision sounds reasonable – the AI is not a lawyer, and thus cannot be part of one's legal team.
But I feel like the decision also raises perplexing questions.
If one thinks of AI as a tool, then it's not much different from Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Word used to be more "private", in the sense that the software runs locally on one's computer, and works even without an Internet connection. Microsoft can't share our documents, as they don't exist on Microsoft's computers. Google Docs (or Word in the cloud) represents the class called SaaS software, software hosted at remote computers, so that the documents of the users appear "private" but are really in the possession of Google.
Not being a lawyer, I wonder if one were to put preparatory materials on Google Docs (or Microsoft Word in the cloud), whether this act creates the same problem, namely, that such materials are not protected by attorney-client privilege.
Further, if one actively collaborates with a lawyer on the Google Doc, is that document protected by attorney-client privilege? Would Google share it with third parties under any circumstances? Would the aforementioned judge decide that the document does not enjoy attorney-client privilege? Is the distinction whether the lawyer is actively involved in the editing or not?
It gets even muckier, as even the blind can see that Google, Microsoft and every other software developer has forced AI features onto editing software, thus blurring the lines between the two product classes. Google Docs and any other similar software now boast that it uses AI models to suggest edits, auto-completions, etc. By allowing such features (in some cases, I'm not even sure users are able to turn them off), do users give up attorney-client privilege?
