Generative AI & Law: A promising yet dangerous intersection

29

September

2024

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Jurisdictional occupations, especially referencing lawyers and attorneys, belong to those with the most intense reading and writing efforts during preparation. Hence, the potential of using generative AI in the jurisdictional branch is huge. For different parts of a lawyer’s occupation, generative AI is in use already, ranging from analyzing contracts or documents to actual chatbots being trained for jurisdictional contents.1 Knowing of this huge potential, I also used generative AI when I worked at a lawyer’s office. Automating specific activities saved me a lot of time. At the start of my occupation, no specified tool for jurisdictional exercises was available, leaving me to use ChatGPT. The chatbot was especially useful for receiving a quick overview of long documents, writing drafts for counter-statements, as well as for researching cases. However, problems with the usage of ChatGPT were soon to be obvious.

On the one hand, AI chatbots don’t understand what they are being fed or what they produce. Generative AI solely produces a word depending on probabilities, which are generated based on patterns of training-sentences.2 Even though that mechanism works well for a variety of tasks, errors can and will occur, especially when sentences become long and complex. This risk further increases, if the model itself was not solely trained on data related to the task. This didn’t only lead to unintelligible information, but also to fully imaginary outputs.3 On the other hand, a lot of jurisdictional issues arose. Firstly, privacy issues are one of the biggest concerns, especially as ChatGPT already exhibited a data leakage scandal.4 Secondly, in order to legally use technical support tools in jurisdictional jobs, those tools have to fulfill specific requirements given in national laws for restricting lawyers. For example, the tool must be independent from any source not being associated with the specific topic of the case, with which a lawyer deals in that moment.5

What do you think about generative AI in law? Which other problems or challenges could occur?


  1. Deloitte. (2023). Generative AI – A guide for corporate legal departments. Retrieved from https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-shared/docs/services/legal/2023/dttl-legal-generative-ai-guide-jun23.pdf; Legalfly. (2024). The Most Secure Legal AI Workspace. Retrieved from https://www.legalfly.ai; Harvey. (2024). The Trusted Legal AI Platform. Retrieved from https://www.harvey.ai. ↩︎
  2. Huang, Ken/Xing, Chunxiao. ChatGPT: Inside and impact on Business Automation. In: Huang, Ken/Wang, Yang/Zhu, Feng/Chen, Xi/Chunxiao, Xing (Hrsg.), Beyond AI. ChatGPT, Web3, and Business Landscape of Tomorrow, Cham 2023, S., S. 45 ff. ↩︎
  3. Spiegel Netzwelt. (2023). Anwalt blamiert sich mit Fake-Fällen aus ChatGPT. Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/new-york-anwalt-blamiert-sich-mit-fake-urteilen-aus-chatgpt-a-8935d1c8-b6c2-4079-8ecd-1cf4c2d33259. ↩︎
  4. Mudaliar, Anuj. (2024). ChatGPT Leaks Sensitive User Data, OpenAI Suspects Hack. Retrieved from https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/news/chatgpt-leaks-sensitive-user-data-openai-suspects-hack/. ↩︎
  5. Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft. (2024). Federal Act on the Free Movement of Lawyers. Art. 12. Retrieved from https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2002/153/en. ↩︎

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Physical goods, information goods, & neurological goods(?)

17

September

2024

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I am fascinated by the idea of information goods – firstly introduced during the start of the 1950s, they prevail to be an incredibly profitable and state of the art product type.1 My fascination arises from the impressive difference between information and physical goods. If the gap between information goods and the next product type is equally big or even larger, which products could we think of?

Imagine, all a person knows is physical goods – the world hasn’t developed non-object (information) goods yet. This fictitious individual is used to buy products, which need to be newly produced, whenever an item is ordered. Additionally, personalizing a product takes a lot of extra work, as the product needs to be adjusted physically, by steps in a manufacturing process not being standardized. Ultimately, the product will break down sooner or later. Telling this person, that there will be another kind of product, being transformable and customizable easily, without any massive extra costs, would leave this person stunning. Further, explaining that the product could be reproduced an unlimited amount of time, without any significant additional cost as well, and that this product wouldn’t be subject to wear and tear over time, would sound unimaginable for this person. This whole process left me thinking: How could the next tremendous product development look like?

Upcoming trends show that this could be cognitive or even neurological goods. In my understanding, both enable physical or knowledge enhancements to be directly bought. On the one hand, cognitive goods would include obtaining knowledge, being entailed in a book, directly (without reading the actual book), by buying and transferring it. Neuralink, for instance, tries to develop enhanced communication between the brain and computers.2 Accelerating this communication to real-time speed, would enable a market for cognitive goods. On the other hand, neurological goods could include all types of physical capabilities. This could not only be skills, which otherwise would need to be learnt over time (e.g., playing the piano), but also those, which can not be learnt anymore, for example because of paralyzation (e.g., walking even though being paraplegic). The precision, with which neuronal activity can be surveilled, replicated, and even stimulated, becomes comprehensible, when considering experiments such as the one of Takagi and Nishimoto (2022), in which they tried to measure neuronal activity of people seeing things, in order to replicate the objects they have seen.3 The results, visualized in the graphic, should leave us stunning and maybe realizing that a market for neurological as well as cognitive goods is not too far away anymore.

  1. Timothy Williamson (2023). History of computers: A brief timeline. Retrieved from: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html ↩︎
  2. Ben Kendal (2024). Was wollen Neuralink und Musk mit ihrem Gehirnchip erreichen – und ist er überhaupt sicher? Retrieved from: https://www.rnd.de/wissen/neuralink-was-ist-das-und-was-will-elon-musk-mit-dem-chip-im-gehirn-erreichen-ZFEHGH2WDVDZ3AGVYXP6OOWYU4.html#; https://neuralink.com ↩︎
  3. Sarah Kuta (2023). This A.I. Used Brain Scans to Recreate Images People Saw. In: Smithsonian Magazine, retrieved from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-ai-used-brain-scans-to-recreate-images-people-saw-180981768/ ↩︎

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