The Implications Of OpenAI’s Assistant For Legal Services And Society

Andrew M. Perlman (Dean, Suffolk; Google Scholar) & Open AI's Assistant, The Implications of OpenAI’s Assistant for Legal Services and Society:

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT. To demonstrate the chatbot’s remarkable sophistication and its potential implications, both for legal services and society more generally, a human author generated this paper in about an hour through prompts within ChatGPT. Only this abstract, the outline headers, and the prompts were written by a person. ChatGPT generated the rest of the text with no human editing.

To be clear, the responses generated by ChatGPT were imperfect and at times problematic, and the use of an AI tool for law-related services raises a host of regulatory and ethical issues. At the same time, ChatGPT highlights the promise of artificial intelligence, including its ability to affect our lives in both modest and more profound ways. ChatGPT suggests an imminent reimagination of how we access and create information, obtain legal and other services, and prepare people for their careers. We also will soon face new questions about the role of knowledge workers in society, the attribution of work (e.g., determining when people’s written work is their own), and the potential misuse of and excessive reliance on the information produced by these kinds of tools.

The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future. They have arrived, and this document offers a small taste of what lies ahead.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• A Human Being Wrote This Law Review Article: GPT-3 And The Practice Of Law (May 11, 2022)
• The Implications Of OpenAI’s Assistant For Legal Services And Society (Dec. 7, 2022)
• ChatGPT And Law School Exams (Dec. 29, 2022)
• GPT Will Soon Be Able To Pass The Multistate Bar Exam (Jan. 5, 2023)
• Using ChatGPT To Write Law School Exams, Bar Exams, And Strategic Plans (Jan. 11, 2023)
• ChatGPT Gets B|B- Grade On Wharton MBA Exam (Jan. 24, 2023)
• ChatGPT Gets C+ Grade On Four Minnesota Law School Exams (C- In Tax) (Jan. 24, 2023)
• The Rise Of The Robotic Tax Analyst (Jan. 27, 2023)
• Ryznar: Exams In The Time Of ChatGPT (Feb. 1, 2023)
• Bishop Posts Two Papers On ChatGPT (Feb. 8, 2023)
• ChatGPT Almost Passed The Bar, But Competent Lawyers Do Much More (Feb. 23, 2023)
• It’s Not Just Our Students: ChatGPT Is Coming For Faculty Scholarship (Feb. 25, 2023)
• New AI Detector Is 97% Effective In Catching Students Cheating With ChatGPT (Feb. 28, 2023)
• It’s Not Just Our Students: ChatGPT Is Coming For Faculty Scholarship (Feb. 25, 2023)
• ChatGPT's Tax Advice Was Wrong 100% Of The Time (Mar. 7, 2023)
• Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs? (Mar. 8, 2023)
• Colleges (And Law Schools) Are Rushing To Respond To ChatGPT (Mar. 9, 2023)
• Was The Sermon You Heard At Church Today Written By ChatGPT? (Mar. 12, 2023)
• GPT-4 Beats 90% Of Aspiring Lawyers On The Bar Exam (Mar. 17, 2023)
• ChatGPT Thinks I Am Way More Interesting Than I Am (Mar. 22, 2023)
• Should ChatGPT Be In Law School? (Mar. 30, 2023)
• Merritt: GPT-4 On Legal Education And Lawyer Licensing (Apr. 4, 2023)
• Turnitin Plagiarism Detector Will Catch Students Who Cheat With ChatGPT With 98% Accuracy (Apr. 5, 2023)
• ChatGPT Gets 148 (37th Percentile) And 157 (70th Percentile) On The LSAT (Apr. 6, 2023)
• AI Tools for Lawyers: A Practical Guide (Apr. 6, 2023)