ChatGPT and Academia - a tense relationship

After the first two days of the IRI§23 conference were primarily about practical usability, as far as the respective streams were related to ChatGPT, the focus on Saturday was on academic topics.

The first was the question of the protectability of language models and their results under copyright law. The answer to the latter is probably complex enough, there would have been no real need for the appeal for a general abolition of copyright in the field of science.

Highly interesting, however, were the reflections on the subject of teaching and on the subject of citation. With regard to teaching, the thesis was put forward without contradiction that the age of "academic homework" is finally over. No teacher can be expected to take responsibility for assignments that are actually written by highly developed chatbots.

And the scientific citation, is it also endangered? - I mean, yes certainly. How should a citation be composed if the result is not repeatable? After all, here there are massive differences in the new technologies compared to the common practice of citing web pages with an exact date of retrieval. But I also wonder if the question is really that prominent. Will there be legions of scientists using ChatGPT to write their papers? If so, then only in marginal areas, and there a copy&paste from Wikipedia should be sufficient. With appropriate reference.

Conclusion: Some questions can be solved, others only in the more distant future. It may be discussed further on academic ground.

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.

Allowed to be wrong sometimes

For years now, the question has been discussed again and again in relevant formats whether lawyers will need programming skills in the future. I have always denied this - to acquire and maintain good legal knowledge is enough to fill an evening, there is no room for another discipline (apart from exceptions).

Today I say: that was too short-sighted. Just as marketing professionals need to have a deep understanding of the processes around digital advertising, lawyers of the future need to have a good understanding of the relevant digital technologies.

They don't have to be the ones writing lines of code for e-discovery suites. But they do need to be able to assess what to expect from the various technologies that are usually grouped under the umbrella term "artificial intelligence." Lawyers and notaries, corporate lawyers, judges, prosecutors and administrative lawyers - all of them will, in the course of their very own work, be facing the question of the use of technology for certain process or procedural steps and will have to assess for themselves what they can expect from it and what the risks are. By this I don't mean the eternal data protection issues, but issues such as bias, training sets, confidentiality, and most especially error calculus.

This also creates a whole new set of challenges for legal academia, but even more so for continuing legal education. For a long time, lawyers have seen time constraints as their central problem. The tension will only be resolved if ... but that is another story.

Catch-up

Recently, I was honored to be jury member at the Global Legal Hackathon. Given the dimension, there are of course quite a few jury teams, but "mine" is worth a second look. And that's how it came up::

Even a glance shows a highly interesting mix of jury members: geographically, the spectrum of members ranges from South Africa to the Baltics, from Romania to the British Isles. Every single one of them has an independent, individual career - practicing lawyers are represented as well as professional startup consultants, for example. But one thing gives me pause for thought:

Is it pure coincidence that the (originally) German-speaking members of our jury team are all male, but all the others are female??? Or is there perhaps a massive #backlog in #diversity in Germany/Austria?

Postscript: this thought is not a hidden critique of the configuration of the jury team - rather, it is a direct consequence of an intense discussion I had with my wife on the topic yesterday; as a doctor in hospital, she has long been used to diverse teams.

The darker side of digitization

Last week, New York City hosted this year's LegalWeek - an annual, multi-day congress on the digitization of the legal industry. After two years of absence due to the pandemic, many sessions revolved around the question of what impact COVID-19 has had on digital development. This question is as difficult to answer after the pandemic as the prophecies in this regard were before. I would like to share two interesting aspects from the event reports here.

First, in his article published on law.com, Rhy Dipshan argues that the demands on judges are increasing as the use of technology in the courts increases. The panel was not at all concerned with fancy understanding of the mechanisms of artificial intelligence. Rather, the focus is on ostensibly trivial mechanisms such as the questioning of witnesses via video call (zoom, etc.). Judges should pay more attention to the setting and the possibilities it offers to parties and party representatives.

Concern was caused by the thesis that the  digitization of the judiciary does not actually improve access to justice, but rather restricts it. Often, it is a matter of simple things like access to basic technology. There was mention of a family court that had entered into a cooperation with a local church, where litigants were given access to the Internet in digital kiosks in the first place. This would be a surprising symbiosis of state and church, which is worth reflecting on further - which brings us back to Lent.

Lent

A week ago, Catholics began this year's Lent. It lasts 40 days, but only because they do not count Sundays; in reality, it is 6 ½ weeks. Today, Lent is mainly equated with abstaining from alcohol, nicotine and fatty foods. In truth, however, it is a time for reflection and inner contemplation. Even if the current geopolitical situation with Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is not suitable for finding inner peace, I would like to briefly apply the idea of renewal to the legal profession and its tools.

One mantra of legal digitization is as follows: Law firms should standardize their processes for reasons of cost reduction and quality assurance and make use of commercial tools ("LegalTech").As a result, the same texts would then be used by many law firms for frequently occurring processes, and at a lower cost accordingly.

After a bit of introspection, however, one could also say: from a third party's point of view, this may be desirable and sensible, but is it enforceable? Obviously, there are major hurdles, otherwise the numerous systems on the market would already have become more widespread. This need not come as a surprise, because which company will agree to changes that make its own market performance interchangeable without massive pressure? Certainly, it is then argued that it is not about "bespoke lawyering", but about the surrounding - but what if the surrounding earns the greater part of the rent in one or the other law firm?

One need not be surprised that the various text generators and clause managers are primarily found in the legal departments: there are similar cases there in high frequency, and the legal departments are not in competition with each other.

08:30 am

At 23:00 CET, Russian television broadcasts President Putin's declaration of war on Ukraine. NATO's reaction: it tries to convene an emergency meeting for 08:30 the next day.

One can easily imagine Vladimir Putin trembling before this reaction. But that is not the topic here, rather the question, what connection does this geopolitical process have with LegalTech and the development of democratic legal systems?

Quite simply, even in 2022 the fast eat the slow. And even if there is no public discourse about it, there are parallel processes. For example, the enforcement of small claims, which have largely migrated from the courts to dispute resolution systems such as Ebay. Does anyone wonder if this abandonment of state authority is actually desirable? No, we are drowning in ethical discussions about blockchain, even though it has the potential to further erode the democratically legitimized rule of law.

Deluded warlords and technological developments have surprising things in common: Those who usurp the law of action have a clear advantage. Contemporary democratic structures tend to be at a disadvantage.