Almost no one reads the long and complicated terms and conditions (T&C) agreements found on websites and apps, but now an artificial intelligence (AI) can pick out the important bits for you.
These legal documents are famously impenetrable 鈥� a 2019 study of 500 popular websites found that 99 per cent required a reading age beyond that of the average person in the US.
In an attempt to alleviate this issue, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues trained a machine learning model to highlight important clauses that users may want to pay attention to. First, the researchers took 1551 T&C statements from 27 shopping websites. They then split the documents into over 200,000 pairs of sentences.
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The team asked people to look at a pair of sentences and rank which was most important, using the results to rank the statements in the whole document in order of importance. People picked out terms defining consumer rights to return, repair or replace items as important, alongside the ability to get refunds or buy items on credit. Any fees were also deemed useful to know.
The researchers then fed this list to a machine learning model, training it to look for important clauses. The AI was 92 per cent accurate at highlighting important statements in new T&C texts it was given, though it tripped up on sentences that used the word 鈥渘ot鈥�, says Hong.
鈥淚t鈥檚 something really trivial that we as humans can understand,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f they say something like, 鈥榃e will not charge you for refunds鈥� versus, 鈥榃e will charge you鈥�, those tend to often get classified the same, unfortunately.鈥�
鈥淭he paper does what many have tried to do over the years, which is to 鈥榗larify鈥� things for human agency,鈥� says at Newcastle University, UK, but she argues that making T&C texts more readable doesn鈥檛 solve the main issue: they are so dictatorial that 鈥渕eaningful consent online in the consumer context does not exist鈥�, she says. 鈥淩ather than trying to highlight 鈥榠mportant鈥� phrases to be wary of, we should be asking for better rights for users.鈥�
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