Chat GPT = the writing is on the wall for the legal profession.

purplefields

For my own line of work, I notice that I'm using Chat GPT more and more frequently. The results are usually better than what I can produce, and much quicker. I know for a fact that my profession is going to drastically change in the very near future as a result.

That got me thinking - what other professions are going to be impacted by Chat GPT and other AI? Something knowledge based and requires interpretation. The Legal profession is an obvious one. Everything from the local solicitor to the supreme court judge. Imagine having the entire case law extremely quickly accessible, with the know how to interpret it.

I like testing it, and asked 'what is a slang term for ten euros. It's response was 'a Pavarotti'. I couldn't work out why that was and asked it. It's response was 'I guess that Pavarotti is a tenor, which sounds like tenner. It didn't look this up, but interpreted it.

Remember, Chat GPT is at is worst right now. Improvements are coming at a scarily fast rate.

GerUpOttaTa

My sister works in a credit brokers and they have already begun to bring in AI in a massive way. She knows the writing is on the wall within the next 2 years and has begun to retrain as a care worker. I think stuff like brokers, insurers, data processors etc... are going to be massively effected.

purplefields

My own line of work requires lots of academia and experience, and it's not boring, repetitive stuff I am using it for (at the moment). It's the other end! - stuff that needs thought and research.

For me, I'm getting out and am going to retrain as an AI-expert.

hullaballoo

It will certainly have an impact on the legal professions but not as you seem to think. It will make a lot of legal research much easier to do. It might assist on some level in preliminary document review type scenarios.

Lawyers don't just sit around reading legal texts all day (more's the pity tbh). There is a lot more to the job than that.

purplefields

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120495884#Comment_120495884

We are at the very beginning of this now. Imagine what it'll be like in even 5 years time.

All the major players are pumping huge money into AI at the moment.

Curious as to what you believe AI won't ever be able to do that lawyers are currently doing?

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120499212#Comment_120499212

Snort cocaine?

Mod: user received an infraction for this comment.

hullaballoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120499212#Comment_120499212

Most of what we do involves assessing personalities tbh. Some of the most successful lawyers know relatively little about the law but are masters of ego management, others are like stage performers. Law is an art and not a science, the practice of law even more so. With the most optimistic view of AI, mastery of art is something that is a long way away if at all possible for machines.

Even if you take out the business side and focus purely on the books, the written down law... Good academic lawyers make their bread by exploring what isn't written down, analysing gaps in the law, overlaying societal/political/ethical needs etc.

I suppose the overarching point is these are human characteristics, heart more so than mind so to speak. The law isn't formulaic thankfully because when it is applied by formula, you get very unjust results.

Chris_5339762

Not in my domain either - when I used it last it generated some very nice text, but every single reference it produced was completely fake. Looked reasonable, with well known (and sensible) authors, but not one of those papers actually existed. Can't trust it.

AndrewJRenko

Some interesting updates on the use of AI for legal purposes in this Fortune newsletter

https://fortune.com/2023/03/07/openai-chatgpt-llms-legal-software-robot-lawyers/

anonymouscactus

ChatGPT doesn't seem to know when it is 'hallucinating,' which is a major drawback. It treats fantastical nonsense as though it has the same epistemological value as a set of facts. ChatGPT appears to be completely lacking in this crucial aspect of self-awareness - as is the case with many humans too in fairness, but we expect more consistency from machines.

For now at least, it's an enhancement, a complementary technology, and not a substitute for human legal labour.

There will be short term opportunities for so-called 'prompt engineers' especially among people with expert domain knowledge. However, this will be short lived too because the AIs will learn how to generate prompts themselves.

Note: I did not use ChatGPT to create this post - its blandness is all mine.

Andrea B.

I dread the day AI overcomes this safeguard.

SuperBowserWorld

For many court cases it will be possible to enter the facts and the AI can produce an objective judgement with the reasons why it produced the judgement.

That would initially be useful for verifying if a judgement provided by humans was adequate or flawed. Also, it would force the rules of judgement out into the open for everyone to see.

Eventually you could have many more cases being processed, much more cheaply, with verification in batches by a much smaller set of humans.

This should reduce the cost of the legal system substantially and make it much more transparent.

This would be step 1 of course ... 😁

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120506800#Comment_120506800

Too late

https://youtu.be/fsF7enQY8uI

Andrea B.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120507052#Comment_120507052

Ouch. This is a frightening development. Only a matter of time, once they honed the Mars landing technology 😐

purplefields

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120502687#Comment_120502687

I guess you are aware due to recent publicity, that ChatGPT has passed the bar exam:

List: Here Are the Exams ChatGPT Has Passed so Far (businessinsider.com)

GPT 3.5 passed it and GPT 4.0 got in the 90th percentile.

You mention Artwork. Well AI is already winning art competitions: Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation - BBC News

So far today I've already used ChatGPT four times in my job.

Robbo

I see in Australia that a lay litigant was suspected to be using ChatGPT to write legal submissions in a criminal appeal. It seems the AI did a reasonable impression of a lawyer. Unfortunately the lawyer impersonated was one who had recently been kicked in the head by a horse as it generated submissions based on legislation that had no application in criminal matters and invented entirely fictitious caselaw.

Victor

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058292837/chat-gpt-the-writing-is-on-the-wall-for-the-legal-profession

In the words of various judges, I think this is an 'ingenious' argument.

These things are language machines, they are not logic machines, they are unlikely to add any insight. They aren't going to come up with something that fast-tracks you to partner.

Serious criminal hackers are already using AI to attack and going forward will be launching some spectacular ones the likes of which we have yet to know. Consequently those in the business of protecting entities, the cybersecurity professionals, need to use similar methods of averting and responding. It is going to end up being a nonstop war between AI cyberattack and defence entities. The attacks would have potential to cause death & destruction. The division between cyberattacks and physical destruction will increasingly blur. Folks, take an armchair to watch Armageddon unfold if you are not already undergoing nuclear destruction.

Yes, I may be overly pessimistic, but the potential is there as this freight train has already left the station.

purplefields

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120575309#Comment_120575309

Yes. ChatGPT is a language machine. It also has logic capabilities- I asked it if it did.

What will be interesting is when an AI specifically for law is released. When all the case law that is fed into it has been verified.

Victor

This is interesting.

https://twitter.com/d_feldman/status/1662308313525100546

Dr Turk Turkelton

I would like to see chatgpt going to toe to toe over bird law with a man this well versed in it.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120499212#Comment_120499212

No we have been doing this for decades and we are still decades away from producing anything near the hype marketing and social media is generating. Yes we can do a lot in terms of assisting in research, application of basic laws (civil law), calculations and so on. We can generate certain inferences from the past, but not create new ones. If you want to get some realism in it, go read some of the stuff from Steve Furber at the University of Manchester. He is one of the people being the original BBC micro and Arm chip. There is more a chance of AI having a serious impact on civil law rather than common law because it requires the application of rules rather than the inference needed when it comes to common law based jurisdictions.

The biggest challenge in getting anything realistic that you can be fully confident in, is find an expert who can explain what they do when they reach a conclusion. And that is a lot harder than it sounds as most experts make great jumps in the process in reaching a conclusion, they just know X is the right answer. An AI system can learn from a given process by analysing it, but it can't analyse the absence of a process. You can give an expert the same set of circumstances on two different days and get two different but right answers.

I worked on my first AI based system back in 1990 and while our ability to process large volumes of data have increased dramatically, our ability to truly infer an outcome beyond the basic math we have be doing has not progressed much at all. We're just able to do it much faster now.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120646321#Comment_120646321

The link is to a tweet about a lawyer using ChatGPT for legal research, and as as a result filing a brief containing a legal argument that relied on non-existent cases (made up by ChatGPT).

But there's more to the story than this. The lawyer didn't just use ChatGPT as a research tool; he got ChatGPT to write the brief. So both the cases and the argument that relied on them were generated by ChatGPT.

When the other side got the brief and wanted to file a counter-brief, they were unable to trace any of the cases cited in the brief. Some of the citations provide were real, but they were citations of entirely different cases dealing with entirely different matters. Other citations didn't lead to any case at all. The cases discussed in the brief couldn't be traced anywhere, and didn't appear to exist.

So asked got the judge in the case to order the first lawyer to file copies of the judgments in the cases he was citing. The judge duly made that order.

So what did the lawyer do? He got ChatGPT to make up judgments for each of the fictional cases, and he filed those. And — surprise, surprise — those judgments themselves contained references to and citations of yet other cases, which were also fictional. Those who've studied the filing in the case say that the original brief filed looks half-way plausible, if you read it in a hurry, but the fake judgements filed are just ludicrous; you'd know immediately that they were not real judgments.

Where we are right now is that the lawyer concerned, and the firm that employs him, have been ordered to appear before the judge to explain why they should not be disciplined for submitting fake law to the court. The judge is said to be incandescent.

So, the writing is certainly on the wall for this particular member of the legal profession. But the wider lesson is that ChatGPT is not yet capable of doing legal research, or producing legal arguments, that will pass muster. All it knows how to do is to produce screeds of text that look like legal argument based on legal research.

purplefields

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120652444#Comment_120652444

Chat-GPT is a general AI system, in its infancy.

Even with this, right now we have Ais passing bar exams. There is huge money in the legal profession, so the incentive is certainly there to develop a legal specific AIs.

I don't believe it's going to be a sudden jump. AI will gradually replace aspects of legal work, until the legal professional is no longer needed. That seems to be the way it is happening for my own occupation.

It is like the beginning of the industrial revolution. People making stuff were gradually replaced by machines. I bet those people thought that their jobs would never be replaced either. The good news is that better jobs come along.

Peregrinus

Any lawyer can tell you that there's a great gap between passing the bar exam and practising law; these are very different activities, requiring very different skills.

I'm not saying that things like ChatGPT might, in time, become very powerful and very useful research tools — I think they certainly will. But the leap from that to advocacy, advice, judgment, discernment is an order of magnitude. Perhaps in time AI will make that leap, but nothing that I have seen about ChatGPT suggests that it's imminent.

Man Vs ManUre

This chat gpt sounds like a bit of a dummy. It cannot be as intelligent as me. Never. Does it even have an account on here to dispute this??

purplefields

I was just using Chat-GPT earlier and asked it for an image. It couldn't find it on the web so it instead used Dall-e to make a selection of images for me.

So it appears that Chat-GPT now has Dall-e built into it as well. The more I use it the more impressed I am with it.

Victor

Ouch!

https://twitter.com/AntikytheraClio/status/1664637970668826624