Throughout the world, legal professionals are settling into a new year of work. But a fresh existential danger is being formed in the form of the much-discussed A1 chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAl.

Legal professionals are asking: Is the job of a lawyer going to be there this time next year? How well does it respond to the questions I have to deal with right now? Is copyright as we know it coming to an end as a result?

In today's BILLawfact we'll introduce you to OpenAI, ChatGPT as well as go over some of the opportunities and hazards in relation to its use in law.

WHAT IS OPENAI?

OpenAI is a private artificial intelligence (A1) research and development laboratory which consists of two entities — the non-profit OpenAi Incorporated and its for-profit subsidiary, Open A1 Limited Partnership. OpenAl creates "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." Tools like ChatGPT are free to use—though, given the high demand, you may have trouble getting in. Their research is conducted with the declared mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

WHAT IS CHATGPT?

OpenAl's ChatGPT is an A1-powered chatbot that provides lengthy text responses to open-ended questions. It received training via reinforcement learning from user feedback. In order to teach the chatbot how to reply effectively, human A1 trainers would simulate conversations between a user and an A1 assistant. ChatGPTwas bilt with one of the largest and most powerful large language models developed to date with around 175 billion parameters and access to 300 billion words.

This allows it to tap into a vast amount of vocabulary, information and contexts to produce meaningful and engaging responses to prompts on a seemingly limitless number of topics

ChatGPT is relatively simple to use—all you have to do is type in your request on the ChatGPT website.

OPPORTUNITIES

Enhanced effectiveness and productivity

ChatGPT appears to be able to quickly produce answers to basic legal queries, quickly construct legal documents like contracts and pleadings, and quickly discover pertinent information referenced to in lengthy legal texts like laws and regulations. If these types of responses can be proven to be trustworthy, lawyers may eventually be able to answer straightforward client legal questions more rapidly and get a head start on topics that are more difficult and strategically advantageous to clients.

Improved communication

As it develops, ChatGPT might also be able to help lawyers by swiftly generating precise and succinct correspondents to parties including clients, counterpart lawyers, and judges.

Access to a broader range of expertise

Subject to ChatGPT eventually being granted access to a broader data set than the current GPT-3 corpus, it may be able to assist lawyers to gain access to a broader range of legal sources than human lawyers would ordinarily consider, eg obscure legal precedents, articles, textbooks and statutes.

HAZARDS

Exaggeration of legal expertise

Only the patterns that ChatGPT has identified from the training data can be used to generate text. Hence, the chatbot may offer a clear and understandable response, but one that is based on an imperfect or outdated understanding of the law, if its training dataset does not contain enough resources on the specific subject of law on which it is queried. Given the vastness of GPT-3, the large language model that ChatGPT is built using, it is doubtful and challenging to determine whether it effectively and completely addresses every area of the law in every jurisdiction.

Fabricating content

Like other A1 programs, when given insufficient information, ChatGPT is susceptible to making up facts and sources. This propensity is particularly dangerous because ChatGPT will often give seemingly factually accurate answers while failing to disclose when it has made up facts. The reported hallucination rate with ChatGPT is 15% to 21%. As a result, lawyers will need to rigorously check the validity of every ChatGPT output they utilize.

Legal professional privilege and confidentiality

The usage of ChatGPT puts the confidentiality and privilege of any data it is asked to consider at risk, just like any other IT service that necessitates input or other exposure of data to a program located outside of an organization's firewall. Any data that law firms or other organizations enter into ChatGPT will be retained and utilized by OpenAl or the ChatGPT software and the security measures OpenAl puts in place. This is something that needs to be made clear to them before they license ChatGPT for their usage.

Throughout the world, legal professionals are settling into a new year of work. But did you know that a fresh existential danger is being formed? This danger takes the form of the much-discussed AI chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI.

In today's BILLawfact we'll introduce you to OpenAI, ChatGPT as well as go over some of the opportunities and hazards in relation to its use in law.

Swipe right to read the full #BILLawFact! Should you have any would like to request legal assistance, you can reach us at cr@budidjaja.law

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.