Tired of reading contracts? Adobe Acrobat’s AI will do it for you

I got my first mortgage three years ago — and when I did, I read every word of the contract. It was a horrible experience, not just for me but also for the bank manager whom I pestered into explaining every clause or term I didn’t understand.

According to Adobe, you no longer need to go through that… at least if you trust its AI system to summarize your contracts for you.

“Contract Intelligence” is what Adobe is calling the new Acrobat AI Assistance feature. It can recognize contracts in PDFs or scanned documents, then generate overviews that are more digestible. “Acrobat AI Assistant generates summaries and responses with clear language and clickable citations, making it fast and easy to navigate to the source and verify responses,” says the blog post (spotted by The Verge).

On the face of it, that seems like a good thing. Contracts are long and confusing — often intentionally so, but sometimes just out of necessity for a complex process. And I’m sure I’m not alone in needing some help truly understanding even the basic stuff, like a lease or insurance policy.

But considering the extremely public and widespread issues we’ve encountered with generative AI summaries, I would hesitate to rely on any tool applying that tech to something as important as a legally binding contract. And that’s just a lack of faith in “AI” on my part.

Imagine how someone could use this to their advantage, though. Lawyers and other legal writers who do this for a living would be able to spot the patterns in AI-generated summaries almost immediately. With that knowledge in their back pocket, it would be easy to write entirely legal contracts in a way that’s intended to steer AI-generated summaries into showing you false or misleading text.

I can see the hypothetical press release now: “It’s not my client’s fault if the plaintiff did not read the contract themselves, and reached the wrong conclusion by using software to read it for them.”

Sorry, bank manager, but I’m still going to pester you before I initial here, here, and here, and sign here, at least for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, if you’re looking for the best PDF tools (AI or otherwise), be sure to check out PCWorld’s roundup.