Legalweek: Is the hype around ChatGPT just a bubble?

Anyone who had the opportunity to attend Legalweek last week in New York City might almost have gotten that impression.

That is not to say that the importance of artificial intelligence for the legal industry has been denied in general. Its relevance to the vast field of discovery, for example, is well seen. The undisputed capabilities of the latest language models when it comes to summarizing documents are also presented as highly forward-looking. Only when it comes to writing legal texts, even as a first draft, have I perceived icy rejection. Why is that?

Usually, after all, it is not the "one" cause that is decisive when forming an opinion. The most common argument I heard was hallucinations. It may be that this topic is even more prominent when a software suddenly invents precedents that don't even exist. The argument that in fact no time is saved if every concept for a brief has to be checked in detail - just like today - also sounds quite factual. The fact that the data status of ChatGPT-4 is September 2021 certainly does not build confidence, even if interfaces for updating were announced recently. And in the end, the sentence "Lawyers hate change", delivered in front of a large auditorium, remained unchallenged there.

So it will be a mix of several motives if no hype about ChatGPT & Co. could be detected with regard to lawyer’s "writing".

Does this mean that the future of the legal industry will not be (radically) changed by Large Language Models after all? I don't think it does, but change takes time on the part of those affected - and unimpeachable quality on the provider side. And it needs participation: without training a model with its own content (data), it will not be possible to ensure the necessary quality, and that costs time and money.

ChatGPT - Revolution or bubble?

At "IRI§23", the International Legal Informatics Symposium in Salzburg, ChatGPT was the star. The deserving organizers had not quite expected this, but the number of visitors to the corresponding streams was high.

But what exactly is so special about this new technology?

• The ability to correctly interp'ret human language, say some.
• The ability to even write texts in a flawless form, the others.
• ChatGPT revolutionizes database searching, according to some; or not.
• It is a system that should be used only by experts because of its error-proneness - or, according to another opinion, only by non-professionals.

And so it went on, and every opinion was well-founded! There was even disagreement on the question of whether ChatGPT would tsunami-like overrun the legal world or whether it was just a risky bubble.

At least concerning the last question I have a clear opinion: ChatGPT (and the epigones) are too big to fail. The billion dollar investment leaves no other development. And after all, never in history has a new technology found so many users so quickly.

Conversational AI is making history, but no one knows exactly what form it will take.