Summary
Jim Melamed, co-founder of Mediate.com, reflects on the platform’s 30-year journey, highlighting its role in the mediation industry’s transition to online mediation. Jim emphasizes the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent widespread adoption of online mediation. Jim’s article then focuses on Mediate.com’s exploration and integration of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically using AI tools like ChatGPT for writing obituaries and NotebookLM for creating AI-generated podcasts. Melamed discusses the potential of AI to enhance various aspects of mediation, including mediator selection and the generation of creative solutions. Finally, Jim encourages mediators to embrace AI as a valuable tool for improving their mediation services and staying relevant in the rapidly evolving mediation field.
Listen to the AI Podcast of this article:
Wow, have we come a long way! It was, in fact, 30 years ago that John Helie, Mediate.com’s co-founder, and I began selling Mediate.com email addresses and email service. Soon after that, we debuted the world’s first mediator directory, closely followed by the release of our innovative Dynamic Web Site System that allowed professional mediators and mediation organizations to manage their own websites. This included our web site clients’ ability to integrate Mediate.com content right into their own individual websites, a move that helped bring the best of mediation information far and wide.
30 years later, Mediate.com’s new challenges is to assist the mediation industry to most capably and ethically integrate “AI” (artificial intelligence) into mediation programs and the mediation process. How did we get here? The answer is “not all at once.” Online technical progress has incrementally, over 30 years, brought the mediation industry, and every other industry, online. What were the key developments along the way?
From Snail Mail and Land Lines to Instantaneous Personal Communication
Mediation has long been dependent upon the communicational technologies of the day. Consider the word processor, the Internet itself, attaching files, WordPerfect and Word, track changes, desk top publishing, web sites, secure document sharing, online appointments, online signing, and online payment. Notably, all of these developments, automating both the “front” and “back” ends of mediation, were already in place when the Covid pandemic arrived in early 2020. It was the fact that so much incremental online technical progress had already been made by 2020 that allowed the mediation and many other professions to survive, if not thrive, during and following the Covid outbreak.
The Covid Pandemic Dramatically Expedited The Move to Online Mediation
Covid, rather remarkably and somewhat surprisingly, provided a mass training event for both professionals and the public on how to use Zoom (and other real time video platforms) as surprisingly capable physical meeting surrogates. Perhaps most remarkably, approximately 80% of mediators and mediation participants now prefer and primarily use online mediation. Every case is now “an online case,” even if participants also choose to augment their online communications with one or more physical meetings.
AI is the Most Powerful “Substantive” Technological Development Yet
To simplify understanding “AI,” I sometimes say to folks, it is “Google x 1,000.” It is like having a hard working and remarkably cooperative assistant read through and capably summarize all of Google’s search results, and do that in approximately 15 seconds.
Another description I offer is that “AI” is like having a remarkably smart, though imperfect, set of interns that never say “no” and are (nearly) always respectful of your desire to learn more and better understand.
My experience with ChatGPT – Mediator Obituaries
The past few months have been rather challenging for the mediation field, losing a number of extremely accomplished leaders in the field. Now approaching 70 myself, I find myself becoming ever more concerned that mediation’s field leaders are properly and most capably remembered and honored. A part of this effort was the establishment of the Mediate.com Memorials Section in 1998 with the death of my own cherished associate, Kathleen O’Connell Corcoran, from breast cancer.
This past summer and autumn, we also lost a number of additional field leaders including Michael Leathes, founder of the International Mediation Institute (IMI); Jeff Krivis, founder of the International Academy of Mediators (IAM); and Tom Fee, one of the leaders of the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (NIDR) and their Statewide Offices of Dispute Resolution initiative.
Feeling compelled to honor these 3 leaders and personal mentors, I rather blindly turned to ChatGPT to help me write capable obituaries. After reading a bit about “AI Prompting” (how to most effectively ask AI engines for things), I embarked on “obituary writing.” More specifically, I simply asked ChatGPT for “a highly complimentary obituary” and provided the AI system with the leading website URL for the deceased colleague, along with the URL of their “Author Page” at Mediate.com, and also the names and web locations of our colleague’s authored books.
The obituary results are available for all to read for Michael Leathes, Jeff Krivis and Tom Fee. Remarkably, each of these obituaries only took ChatGPT approximately 15 seconds to complete. I will admit to changing a couple of words (no more) and to also embedding a few links in each obituary, but that is it. What I quickly realized is that ChatGPT, quite simply, was better at writing a compelling obituaries than I was, by a mile. The proof of all this soon came with my boss, Colin Rule, and family members from each of the deceased families contacted me directly to thank me for writing such emotionally moving obituaries.
Initial Experiences with Google’s NotebookLM Text and Audio Summaries (aka Mediate.com AI Podcasts)
A somewhat more joyous initial AI experience for me was discovering Google’s NotebookLM AI system. Built to help students and others best learn complex content, NotebookLM offers a number of text output options (including Summaries, FAQ, Study Guides and Briefing Documents.) While all of these text output options are valuable and have their place, the output option that captured me and my imagination is the “audio output” option, now more affectionately known as “AI Podcasts.” You can see (and listen to) all Mediate.com AI Podcasts developed to date (approaching 100) here.
While imperfect (mostly occasional mispronunciations), the NotebookLM system is compelling. The whole goal of the system is to help listeners take in the most helpful overview of the “source material.” The system does not go off on as many tangents as human podcasts do. The whole goal of the system is to help the listener most capably learn the original source content and the system does a remarkably capable, pleasant and even entertaining way of doing this. Give a listen!
What is super cool for me is that this AI podcast conversion of what are often long, if not laborious, articles and books takes only about 10 minutes total to create. While the resulting AI podcast does not “replace” the original source material (which may be one or more PDFs or even a YouTube video), the AI podcast does a rather remarkable job, typically in a 10-20 minute podcast, of comprehensively and effectively summarizing the original source material for the listener. Perhaps most compelling is that listeners can take in all of this readily digestible audible content while cleaning the house, exercising or otherwise “multi-tasking.” Personally, I find taking in AI auditory content much easier and less burdensome than reading long articles and books . . . and there is nothing in the AI podcast approach that precludes the listener from also reading the original source material . . . in fact, I am convinced that listening to a quality AI podcast makes the listener more likely to read the original source material, rather than less likely. AI podcasts are bringing new life and attention to Mediate.com’s expansive collection of textual content. Most remarkably, the typical response from an author when I share an AI podcast of their written work is, quite simply, “Wow!”
Continued AI Development at Mediate.com
Energized by the American Arbitration Association’s purchase of and investment in Mediate.com and ODR.com (See Press Release) Mediate is now also developing a Mediator Selection Chatbot (AI wizard) for locating the best mediators for a particular dispute. This complimentary system will be additional to our traditional “field search” Locate a Mediator system.
Mediate.com, and yours truly, are also now developing systems along the lines of “What would a mediator suggest? We anticipate that this will result in both “lay” and “professional” services. The great thing about mediation, in contrast to arbitration, is that we are never asking the system for a “single answer,” but, rather, two or more suggestions for making dispute resolution progress. Experienced mediators know the danger of offering a single possibility, it almost always comes off as “directive” and risks a mediator’s rapport relationship with each party.
Learning To Date
Importantly, note that we can combine the use of AI platforms – They are all just tools. For example, when I process an initial cut of an audio podcast in NotebookLM, if I am not satisfied, I write down all of the changes that I would like made to the podcast, and then I go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT how I can best state my desired changes in “prompting language” for NotebookLM. So, I use one AI engine to help me most capably perform with another AI engine. Crazy, I know!
In mediation, as the reader almost certainly knows, we are always looking for options, multiple possibilities, things that might work, be exchanged, etc. – we are never looking for a single directive answers (that is arbitration). As mediators, we are “curious,” and we “wonder” with the AI engine what might help a particular set of disputants.
Notably, we can also use AI to create “dis-associative frames” for consideration. As “associative frame” is when we ask a participant a question expecting that they will answer with their regular, every day, subjective perspective. While it is certainly valuable to understand each of these subjective perspectives, experienced mediators also know that we can get new and different and often more helpful responses when we remover a participant from their normal everyday perspective to some other perspective, shifting the person, place or time of the perspective.
For example, a mediator might say, “Knowing that things are really difficult and confusing right now, what is it that you would like your children to be able to say to one another, perhaps 10 years down the road, maybe at your youngest Bobby’s high school graduation, about how you most capably arranged for the children’s parenting so that they could have a quality relationship with each of you?” Or we might ask the parties, imagine that you are not you, but a fly on the wall. And you are not any fly, but you are “Zen Fly.” You are the wisest, all knowing being that has heard everything and knows everything and is now being asked, “what do you think the optimizing solutions for the two of you might ideally be, arrnagements that would be optimizing and most acceptable to both of you?” – how do you think Zen Fly would respond to that question. One option is that we ask the participants this question, perhaps as asynchronous “homework,” or we could also just ask ChatGPT or another leading AI engine for its ideas about what “Zen Fly” might suggest.
AI Surprises
I initially thought mediators would be educating naïve parties about the use of AI. I now realize that it is far more the other way around!
I now am reminded that mediators need to meet each individual party “where they are.” This is also true regarding AI. Parties now already commonly bring with them some measure of AI knowledge and experience and it is critical that we “meet them where they are” in this regard also.
As mediators, we can then work with and build upon participants’ existent AI knowledge and add helpful additional facilitative AI approaches, e.g., perhaps asking the same curated questions to more than one AI engine, or having available a set of questions that the participants can try out on a variety of AI engines, knowing that there will be no single “right answer” and that the resulting dissonance can be utilized by the mediator to create additional flexibility for participants.
The Future – Choreographing Communications
Whereas our old palate 30 years ago was snail mail, land lines and joint physical meetings, the new communication palate is: text, image, audio and video – real time or asynchronous. Your job as mediator is to most capably choreograph and coordinate all of these communicational options.
Asynchrony means participants do not need to immediately respond, they can actually think about things in a capable and relaxed manner and fashion new thoughts (e.g., “homework,” perhaps now also including AI homework?)
Developing Rapport online is more challenging than in person, yet key – consider brief “AV Checkout Meetings” with each party. I have found that scheduling a brief initial 10-15 minute “caucus” to be sure that each party (and perhaps their legal counsel) are most capably connected to Zoom or whatever platform we are using is a valuable approach, both to be sure that all of the technologic communications are working smoothly, and also to answer any pressing issues that the party would prefer to not raise in the presence of the other party.
My experience is also that of using nimble and active joint and caucus meetings online. I prefer individually scheduled meetings better than “breakout rooms.” So, at the end of a joint meeting, I might inquire if I could call each party separately the next day (after they have slept on things) to discuss their additional ideas for making new progress toward resolution.
Online mediation is clearly more accessible, efficient, convenient, flexible, and affordable than traditional “brick and mortar” mediation. With AI, mediation will now be ever more informed, especially as we are also able to inquire of our AI engines as to “what has worked for other similarly situated participants!”
Important: Participants do not generally need to “prevail” in mediation, they are simply unwilling to “lose.” To settle in a satisfying way, participants need both a measure of value and a “face-saving rationale” to explain their additional willingness to be flexible. In this regard, AI can be very helpful in developing “normative stories” of how similarly situated others have been successful in optimizing their arrangements and agreeing (face-saving rationales of others provide models for movement). Normative stories help participants to feel “normal,” rather than “abnormal,” and provide face-saving rationale for flexibility and movement.
In Conclusion
Getting comfortable and creative with the use of AI will be key to your future mediation success. Knowing that many of us, as we “mature,” are ever more resistant to change, especially changes in online technologies, I would like to offer my assessment that, when it comes to AI, “resistance is futile” if you want to be a highly effective mediator in the future. So, rather than resist, I suggest “enjoy” AI.
So, in addition to instantaneous personalized communication, be that text, image, audio and/or video, and both real time and asynchronous communication, mediators now have a rapidly expanding set of AI platforms and tools to embrace that, with experience, will make our efforts ever more powerful and capable. So, be open to AI! Doing so will make you a better mediator and also score major points with your children, friends, and relatives who thought you might be “over the hill.”
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