The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools  has touched the world of negotiation and conflict resolution in a variety of ways. It is the growth of AI that has led to legal disputes over the ways the tools have been trained. And the tools have been applied in procurement and as negotiation coaches.

AI has been increasingly enlisted to help mediate disputes. AI mediation might not yet be commonplace, but before long, it is likely to play an essential role in dispute resolution. Here, the risks and potential benefits of using AI in mediation will be considered. 

Risks of AI Mediation

Currently, the biggest risk of using AI in mediation is the possibility that it may bring errors to the process. Many of us have seen comical (and sometimes frightening) news stories of chatbots behaving bizarrely, as when a tool produced strange “hallucinations” in response to simple questions, unsettled a reporter enjoying worldwide prestige with creepy declarations of love, and produced inedible recipes for some certain festivals.

With these tools in their infancy, the risk that they will deliver inaccurate or even harmful mediation suggestions really exists. “We have all heard about lawyers using chat-based tools to augment their writings and including ‘hallucinations’ such as made-up case citations,” writes a famous clerk of one enterprise. When unchecked by human mediators, AI mediation risks running regardless of laws and ethical standards, which is really inevitable without human intervention.

Besides, generative AI is ill-equipped to assist parties in handling the strong emotions frequently coming up during mediation. “Mediators’ skilled in dealing with such emotions as anger, frustration, and fear—which may be fueling the conflict—is crucial to the dispute resolution process, and mediators have creation of an environment where participants can express their emotions more and more constructively,” writes a famous person from a key university.

Advantages of AI Mediation

Disputes often involve large volumes of data, which AI can sift through and analyze really swiftly.  Generative AI tools, trained on vast data sets, have remarkable capability for natural language processing, thus enabling them to rapidly search, compare, summarize, and extract insights from a great number of texts, images, and data.

Some AI tools were trained with some certain programs to have analysis of documents and complete other tasks for lawyers. AI can save time and money for mediators and disputants by performing in a high speed tasks which would take humans hours, days, or months to complete.

Increasingly in AI mediation, some AI tools are more closely associated with the negotiations themselves. For example, generative AI tools can result in questions with the purpose of identification of the parties behind interests, propose offers, and predict the possibility that such offers will be accepted. In AI mediation, human mediators might choose to compare their own lists of questions with those generated by AI technology in order to guarantee that they haven’t missed anything important.

Additionally, AI could theoretically make mediation more impartial by helping to correct for the biases that affect human decision making. “It is because AI systems are not influenced by emotions or personal biases that they are less likely to make decisions based on subjective factors,” according to a certain agency.