Reader’s Digest, the century-old magazine with the highest paid circulation, has long published “condensed” books; anthologies of four-to-five popular novels abridged to fit in a single volume.  Condensed Books were once enormously popular, with tens of millions of copies in circulation.  They were also an abomination to serious readers, a literary Tang for those who preferred fresh-squeezed OJ. I’ve never read a condensed book, so I’m in no position to judge their merit save to say that I believe reading anything is a good thing.  I imagine the condensed versions conveyed the guts of the story well enough to sound like you’d read it over drinks with the neighbors before the Ed Sullivan show.

But I am enough of a purist (okay, “snob”) to worry about the impact of summarization.  As an undergraduate English major, I had to wade through some challenging tomes.  I have no empirical evidence for it, but I’m certain those books are a part of me in ways they never would have been had I sought out the Cliffs Notes instead.  I expect most avid readers feel the same.  Summaries necessarily discard content, and what remains is incapable of conveying the same tone, nuance and detail.

So, I worry when the tech industry touts the value of AI summarization of documents, especially as a means of speeding identification and review of evidence in discovery.  I question whether the “Reader’s Digest Condensed Evidence” will convey the same tone, nuance and detail that characterize responsive productions.  Will distillation be made of distillations until genuine intelligence is lost altogether? 

It’s an inchoate apprehension—an old man’s anxiety perhaps—but litigation is about human behavior, human frailty and failings.  I fear too much humanity will disappear in AI-generated summaries with the underlying communications less likely to see the light of day.  The mandate that discovery be “just, speedy and inexpensive” is now read as “just speedy and inexpensive.”  That discarded comma is tragic.

Technology is my lifelong passion.  So, I am not afraid of new tech as much as put off by the embrace of technology to further speed and economy without due consideration of quality.  LegalWeek 2024 will be a carnival of vendors touting AI features and roadmaps.  How many will have metrics to support the quality of their AI-abetted outcomes?  How many have forgotten the comma while chasing the cash? Per Upton Sinclair, ““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Unquestionably, we must reduce the cost of discovery to protect the portals of justice.  Justice no one can afford to pursue is no justice at all.  But there are uniquely human characteristics we should continue to esteem in discovery, like curiosity, intuition, suspicion and impression; the “Spidey-sense” we derive from tone, nuance and detail.  Before we use AI to summarize collections then deploy AI to characterize the summaries, can we pause just long enough to see if it’s going to work? Real testing, not just that which supports salaries.