Comment 8: “AI”mageddon or Do You Remember Y2K?

The ABA Rules of Professional Conduct, Model Rule 1.1 Comment 8 requires, “To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer shall keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” To that end, we have developed this regular series to develop the competence and skills necessary to responsibly choose and use the best technologies for your educational and professional lives. If you have any questions, concerns, or topics you would like to see discussed, please reach out to e.koltonski@csuohio.edu.

It is entire possible that zeitgeist has not been captured by Artificial Intelligence so much since the release of Terminator 2 in 1991. Unlike SkyNet which became “self-aware” and decided to terminate humanity, ChatGPT and its competitors are more likely to end up only changing how we create and interact with content. This is a little less exciting than the adventures of John Connor, but no less important.

Current AI is new, but it’s also just an outgrowth of the familiar. Over the last few years we’ve been familiarized with the concept of algorithms thanks to the constant debate by politicians and cable news pundits. AI, like ChatGPT, is just a type of deep-learning algorithm known as a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs can “read, recognise, summarise, translate, predict, and also generate text” and I reallt recommend reading this great (and easy to understand) explanation of the technology by KDnuggets, a website that covers all sorts of big data topics.

To make the idea of LLMs as easily digestible as possible is difficult, but I’ll try:

An LLM is fed a massive amount of data that is typically pulled from the internet. It then tries to learn the context of language. Later, when presented with a prompt, the LLM attempts to answer the prompt by attempting to understand the context of the prompt and then using what it understands of language to cobble together the most likely response.

What do I mean by context?

How would you respond if I asked you, “What’s up?” Likely, you would understand I was asking you something ranging from “how are you” to “what are you doing”. The goal is for LLMs to understand the context of language rather than thinking of “up” as a place something exists.

A lot of people, very smart people, are trying to figure out the uses for this technology even as it is still being developed. Programmers have found that LLMs can help them write better code, because there is likely a lot of completed code included in its data. A start-up in New York attempted to use AI in courtrooms to defend against traffic tickets, which was not attempted when the CEO was threated with imprisonment and then got sued. Yes, students have also tried to use LLMs to write papers for the and LLMs have “passed” difficult certification tests like the bar exam. I find the former a little amusing as schools have been using plagiarism checkers for a long time, and this software just scours large datasets for “similarities”. There is even some humor to be had with the latter. Think about it, LLMs were probably trained on a lot of previous bar exams and study guides. How well would you score if you had an eidetic memory?

Joking aside, LLMs are likely a watershed moment that will eventually change aspects of our life. It’s important to remember that it won’t happen today, or tomorrow, or any time very soon. Until then I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the technology. Maybe even play around with it a bit and see what it can do. For example: I saw a post recently where somebody suggested using LLMs to read Terms of Service and have it highlight any non-standard clauses.