Chat GPT will launch on November 30, 2022. In just two months, there were an estimated 100 millions users. Four months later it had one billion active users. This success overnight has generated a lot of excitement for the potential of chatbots and artificial intelligence. It is important to know what the technology can and cannot currently do, as promising as it may be.
AI Tools
ChatGPT (free), ChatGPT (4.0) ($20/month subscription), and Bing Chat are three general-purpose AI applications.
ChatGPT was the first AI option to gain popularity, and is still the most popular. ChatGPT will respond to simple commands, which may or may not prove useful. ChatGPT will respond with a response that you can refine. The more specific you can be, the better your chances of finding what you’re looking for.
ChatGPT, both the free and paid versions, logs all conversations, including personal information you share. This data can be used as training data. Version 3.5 is not suitable for legal work.
ChatGPT 4.0’s paid version offers an “incognito” mode where you can turn off “chat history and education.” This isn’t a perfect solution but if you use it carefully, you could find that this version works better for legal work.
Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI in early 2023. OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT. Bing Chat was released shortly after, a ChatGPT 4 based chatbot that is integrated with the Bing search engine. Bing Chat, which combines the power of ChatGPT 4, with real-time internet access, can produce some of the most impressive artificially intelligent results available today. Microsoft has also indicated that it will keep your interaction with the technology confidential.
ChatGPT gone wrong
A recent case involving New York City attorney Steven A. Schwartz is a shocking example of ChatGPT’s limitations. It was found that several of the cases cited by Schwartz in a filing were not real. He claimed that he had used ChatGPT “to supplement the legal research”. ChatGPT produced great-sounding case law in order to support his legal arguments, and Mr. Schwartz did not verify the facts with other sources. He claims he asked ChatGPT to confirm that the cases were true, was assured they were by the bot, and presented the chatbot generated fiction as fact in court. Later, Mr. Schwartz stated that the chatbot had “displayed itself as unreliable.”
Hallucinations
ChatGPT is a powerful technology that can be described as “autocomplete on steroids”. Instead of trying to complete sentences, the software will respond to questions and requests based on the data it has been trained with. These responses can be very impressive and helpful.
ChatGPT is capable of doing many wonderful things. However, it also has the ability to lie with great confidence. This is known as a “hallucination” when AI makes up things and presents them confidently as facts. Research is being conducted to combat hallucinations. Verify anything an AI says independently.
I urge you to give Bing Chat and ChatGPT a try if you haven’t already. A word of caution: do not use these tools to make pleadings unless you have verified the facts using reliable sources. OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies offer free and paid options. However, there is no version that is hallucination-free.
Bing chat knows more than OpenAI’s “ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence produces unpredictable results. Early results included racist, sexist, and other negative responses.
OpenAI responded by putting teams in place to review ChatGPT generated data for more than a year, eliminating results that were unacceptable before opening the access to the public. The solution to the terrible results was to perform base training for both 3.5 and 4.0 on “frozen” September 2021 data. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, therefore, is unaware of any information from the last two years. Bing Chat has access to the Internet (with “guardrails”, to prevent horrible results). It knows what’s happening.
Written by a real human. This article was not created by a chatbot. All of it was written by me.
The post Artificial intelligence and the Practice of Law – Enormous potential, but extreme caution is advised first appeared on Attorney at Law Magazine.