The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) on Tuesday announced a new research project on consumer law with Meta’s support. The project which will assess how large language models (LLM) can be used for building public solutions for enhancing efficiency in India’s consumer grievance redressal system, will be executed by NLSIU along with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) as the knowledge partner.
“The government is committed to creating a safe environment for consumers. The launch of the research project is a step forward in our efforts to evaluate innovation solutions using generative AI for enhancing consumer rights and awareness, underpinning our efforts on consumer protection in India. The initiative pioneered by the DoCA along with NLSIU and IIT Bombay is supported by Meta and is a significant step towards using open innovation for building applications for the benefit of consumers,” said Rohit Kumar Singh, Secretary, DoCA.
The feasibility of leveraging Meta’s openly available LLM, Llama 2 will be explored by the research project in creating and evaluating a proof of concept of citizen centric chatbot and a decision – assist tool in the area of consumer law.
“With the goal of enhancing efficiency, the chatbot will be designed to guide consumers on the procedural aspects of drafting a complaint and answering questions relating to consumer law in India. The decision assist tool in this research also will be designed to support searching case laws and summarisation of documents to provide assistance to judicial authorities in the area of consumer affairs,” said a press release from NLSIU.
The release added that the project will also explore how the LLMs can assist both consumers and judicial authorities in the context of ongoing oversight and control by human decision makers. NLSIU and IIT Bombay will also release a white paper, keeping with their commitment to responsible innovation, which will explain the risk mitigation approaches implemented and how responsible design principles have been deployed at every layer of stack.
At the launch of the project, Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, said, “We will create a rich corpus of Indian legal resources to map the landscape of consumer disputes in the country, and use this corpus to train the Llama model. We will work to ensure that the material fed into the model is relevant, reliable, and user-friendly. Additionally, we will develop a prototype of a decision-assist tool to support efficient consumer dispute resolution.”
