ChatGPT Stole the Show: Generative AI and the Law
On January 24, 2023, I presented on a panel program entitled “Unique Privacy Concerns” at the Practicing Law Institute Program “Artificial Intelligence Law 2023.” You can view information about the program and watch the recorded video by going to the PLI website here. It was clear from the program that ChatGPT and other forms of generative stole the show. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, the application has seen a huge upsweep in adoption. The news media are beginning to fill with stories about uses of ChatGPT. Also text to image and text to video applications are cropping up. We are in the early days of generative AI, but I believe we’ve really hit an inflection point in the adoption of AI technology. Individuals and businesses are using ChatGPT in their daily activities, and the impact is very personal. Accordingly, generative AI captured the interest of the public in a way that previous AI technologies have not.
Generative AI systems can produce all kinds of text, images, and other content from simple prompts in a seemingly miraculous fashion. For instance, I asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet extolling the virtues of the Practising Law Institute, and it came up with this result:
Oh Practicing Law Institute, how great thou art!
A beacon for lawyers, a shining star
Your courses and programs are second to none
In legal education, you are the one
From New York City to San Francisco Bay
Your knowledge is spread in every way
With experts in law, and skilled attorneys too
You offer a path to legal breakthroughs
Your mission to provide knowledge and skill
To all who seek to learn and grow in law
With ethics and values, you instill
A passion for justice, a sense of awe
Oh Practicing Law Institute, we extol
Your virtues and worth, from heart and soul.
The sonnet is obviously not award-winning poetry. Nonetheless, it is amazing, first, that a chatbot is aware of facts about PLI and, second, that it can generate amusing poetry and other text content about a random topic within seconds. Generative AI also has its downsides in generating content such as hard-to-detect “deepfake” videos, audio, and images used for fraud, cyberattacks, and disinformation.
OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. ChatGPT is an example of a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) large language model (LLM). On March 14, 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, its latest LLM and a significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3. ChatGPT-4 is an improvement on GPT-3 and provides an interface by which members of the public can easily interact with it. Similarly, Google opened access to its rival LLM Bard on March 21, 2023. ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI have gone viral, and the hype about generative AI in traditional media and social media reached red-hot levels in early 2023. Accordingly, generative AI will almost certainly gain greater attention from policymakers in the second half of 2023.
I am going to have more to say about ChatGPT and other forms of generative artificial intelligence in the upcoming months. Already, I am planning the Fifth Annual American Bar Association Artificial Intelligence and Robotics National Institute. Generative AI will be a theme running through the Institute. Stay tuned for more content on generative AI.
Steve Wu