The legal space is full of talk of AI. Is it coming to take your job? Will it take over the world? Will it turn on us like in so many blockbuster movies?!
Some commonly used forms of AI are Chat GPT and Bard there are many more and many are free to use. You can literally type in questions and get answers right away. I could have typed in ‘write an article on a topic of interest to solicitor in the UK’… but I didn’t!
You can then change the tenure and tone of the draft, i.e. write it in the style of a poem, a high school student, a university professor; in the third person, first person, from the point of view of a penguin! Really the possibilities are endless!
The simplest form of this actually being harnesses for law firms could be a bot on your website to reply to queries. Many sites have pop up help chats, these can easily be handed over to a bot for initial enquiries. Equally you might ask it to draft an article or outline a topic for review. If you take a skeleton outline and fill in the details yourself with research this can save real time.
However, we have already seen people go too far and ask AI for entire briefings leading to the citing of fictional cases in court and appropriate sanctions.
The law society has already come up with some guidance for its use.
There has been a lot of discussion around how AI should be used and where the lines should be drawn. The speed of AI’s development is of course, at the rate of all things technological, so vastly more rapid than our development that we may ultimately need help to keep up; or indeed rules to cap its capacity. There are strong calls for a moral code to be embedded within it from people like Mo Gawdat (a fascinating listen), and he should know as one of the earliest pioneers of it! He believes that with the IQ of just slightly less than Einstein at present, it is a matter of months until it reaches more than that and then perhaps a short time until it comes up with concepts that we can no longer understand.
For an example of how a few months makes a difference see this article on how in January Chat GPT got 50% on the SQE, meaning it would have failed the SQE. By March they repeated the exercise and it got 78% so would be in the upper quintile of passes!
This will certainly prove to be a minefield for many people but it has to be said where there is uncertainty it is the law’s job to bring certainty and so there will be opportunities for lawyers to wrestle the tech into society and business. By understanding AI you will be able to help solve the problems it creates.
