With recent changes to Ohio’s laws on sealing and expungement, more people in Ohio want information on Ohio expungement laws. With recent technological advances, more people all over the world want to learn about, and utilize, artificial intelligence (AI). Many people use AI for many different things. A common use of AI is for research purposes. People ask it the types of questions they used to ask traditional search engines. As an experiment, we asked AI to write an overview of Ohio expungement laws. As you might expect, it was not completely accurate. This implies that some people may get the wrong idea by using AI. We also assume that the AI’s answers reflect some of the misconceptions people have on the topic. In this article, we look at a few examples from the AI overview. We will point out how they do not quite aline with Ohio expungement laws.
Expunged Records are Destroyed
In the intro of the AI overview, it mentioned that an expunged record still exists but is not visible to landlords, employers, or the general public. While that may be a decent description of sealing, sealing and expungement are two distinct things, especially after some changes to Expungement laws in 2023. Expungement does mean that the record is destroyed.
Waiting Periods for Expungement in Ohio
As you may know from reading our previous articles, sealing and expungement in Ohio are different. The waiting periods for sealing and waiting periods for expungement in Ohio can be complex.
The AI overview we describes a timeline that seems to attempt to explain the sealing timeline when we asked it to give an overview of expungement. Even that explanation was not perfect. We found most fault in the way the AI explained expunging felony convictions.
In most situations, waiting requirements are the same for expunging most felony convictions: 10 years from the sealing of the record. But when it comes to sealing the record in the first place, the rules are more complicated. In order to seal an F3 conviction, the Court will follow some complex rules in assessing your record. F4 and F5 conviction have different requirements. AI lumped all of these requirements together and said they were requirements for sealing, which is incorrect.
Please don’t let our description of the AI overview confuse you. If you want to know the true waiting periods, we have spent a lot of time making accurate tables for sealing and expungement in Ohio
The Expungement Application Process
We found two big issues with the AI’s description of the expungement process. First of all, it failed to mention the sealing process. As we mention in previous articles, having a record sealed is usually a prerequisite to having the record expunged. Secondly, the AI ended the summary of the expungement process by saying the record would be sealed. But again, sealing and expungement are not the same thing, at least not in Ohio.
Conclusion
We are not sharing the AI overview we generated on our website. For one thing, we do not want to have incorrect information on our website, even if it is only to point out its flaws. Also, if you ask AI to generate a similar overview, you will likely not get a word for word response to ours. However, if you use the same service, the same underlying problems will impact your results.
The first underlying problem here is that the AI thinks sealing and expungement are the same thing. This may be because the AI is using its own database and not the web. Therefore, some of its information may be out of date. Recent laws in Ohio make sealing and expungement very distinct from each other. Even before these changes, it was never correct to think that sealing and expungement in Ohio were the same. People often used the term “expungement” to mean “sealing,” but that was mainly due to the fact that true expungement was not possible in many adult cases. Now that sealing and expungement are both possible in many situations, it is best to use them as separate terms.
Another underlying problem is that the rules for sealing and expungement are very complex. While AI has amazing creative capabilities, it either pulled from an outdated source, struggled to analyze the information correctly, or both.
If you want more information on Ohio expungement laws, don’t ask your favorite AI engine. Rather, read our articles on the topic, go straight to the Ohio Revised Code, or contact one of the experts at Dearie Fischer & Martinson.
