For years, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been hinted at, dreamed about, portrayed in movies and discussed, but in hypothetical, future-oriented terms. Suddenly, it seems that the future may be much closer than many people thought. Last week's release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot is a game-changing development for AI technology available to the public, and should spark all manner of debate about where the technology will go from here - and how quickly - including in the legal field.
If you take a minute to play around with the chatbot after establishing a free account with OpenAI, you'll see its capabilities are truly remarkable. Ask it to write 1000 (or 2000, or 3000) words about a legal topic, like product liability law. Does the work product that comes out (nearly instantly) reach Foley & Lardner standards of quality? No - not yet, anyway. But could it provide an instant starting point, if not substitute, for some content creation in the very near future? What about legal memorandum and brief-writing?
Did ChatGPT write this post? It didn't, I promise...but within a few years, will you believe me?
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in emerging technologies continues to advance rapidly. San Francisco-based OpenAI made its latest creation, the ChatGPT chatbot, available for free public testing on Nov. 30. A chatbot is a software application designed to mimic human-like conversation based on user prompts. Within a week of ChatGPT being unveiled, over a million users had tried to make the tool talk, according to Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
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