Yu Tianmiao is a lawyer at Beijing Shangquan Law Firm, director of Shangquan Young Lawyers' Work Department, and director of Shangquan Information Network Crime Research and Defense Department
What is ChatGPT?
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released its developed chatbot program ChatGPT, full name Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence technology, which can learn and understand human language to conduct conversations, and can also interact according to the context of the chat, truly chat and communicate like humans, and even complete tasks such as writing emails, video scripts, copywriting, translation, code, and writing papers.
ChatGPT is not the first artificial intelligence with these functions, but the performance of ChatGPT has been qualitatively improved on the basis of previous programmatic and modular artificial intelligence, basically glimpsing the threshold of general artificial intelligence, and even passing the mental theory test.
What can ChatGPT do in the legal industry?
1. Pass the bar examination
According to a study titled "GPT Takes the Bar Exam" published on GitHub by Michael Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz, ChatGTP achieved an average accuracy rate of 50.3% on the complete NCBE MBE practice test with standardized exam preparation questions provided by official organizations as learning materials, and its Top2 and Top3 choices were 71% and 88%, respectively The correct rate.
It should be noted that although some scholars pointed out that the answers obtained by ChatGPT lack explainability, and there are some problems and errors in the answers given in the written exam, this is because the ChatGPT learning set only has question stems and answers, and does not input the question analysis and reasoning process, after providing the corresponding topic analysis and reasoning process, the author believes that the topic analysis part of ChatGPT output will be greatly improved.
2. Write legal papers and legal opinions
Recently, a large number of tutorials such as "how to complete a literature review in one day with an AI assistant" have appeared on various online platforms, and ChatGPT has shown a deep understanding of the basic legal rules when writing the paper. ChatGPT does a good job of accurately summarizing appropriate legal theories and correctly reciting the facts of a specific case.
Although some scholars have pointed out that ChatGPT has a hard time delving into the relevant issues when writing papers, and often only superficially applies the rules to the facts. However, as far as the author's current learning experience is concerned, most law undergraduates and graduate students still have the problem that their research is not in-depth enough, and their views and expositions are superficial when writing their papers. The original intention of ChatGPT was only to be created as a general-purpose intelligent chatbot, and it is somewhat impractical to ask ChatGPT to study law-related issues in depth without entering the learning and training sets in related fields; In terms of technology, ChatGPT will combine content training in more technical fields including law in the future, and will be more profound in the depth of thesis research.
3. Become an AI lawyer and AI judge?
First of all, we need to affirm that ChatGPT has a basic and comprehensive understanding of various legal issues, and has fluent organizational language and expression skills. Based on the performance of ChatGPT in the bar exam when accepting the previous question set as a training set and ChatGPT's performance in writing papers in related fields based on the previous relevant content in 2021 as a training set, it can also be preliminarily judged that ChatGPT can output relevant legal research content, and can have good AIGC output in answering legal questions, writing legal opinions, and writing legal papers.
It is not difficult to imagine that ChatGPT, under the authority of the Internet access interface, can participate in the writing of legal search reports, enterprise due diligence reports, contract review reports, applications for release on bail pending trial, applications for evidence collection, legal opinions and other materials, as well as judicial documents such as indictments and judgments. Compared with human intelligence, the materials written by ChatGPT are more fluent and accurate, and as a tool to assist in handling cases, it can greatly improve the work efficiency of legal staff, and exists as AI judge assistants, prosecutor assistants, and legal assistants.
In January 2023, Don't Pay announced the suspension of the world's first AI lawyer's court appearance program developed by its company's training and development amid strong opposition and criminal risks from human "peers". This also means that at the technical level, according to the needs of the legal field for AI design and development, enrich ChatGPT learning samples, strengthen ChatGPT research in professional fields, as legal users understand and use ChatGPT in depth, I believe that CHatGPT will become an AI lawyer and even an AI judge in the future.
About ChatGPT-induced job anxiety
First of all, I would like to set a premise for this topic, that is, to discuss the impact and response of ChatGPT on the legal community based on ChatGPT and the expected development of AI in the short term. The so-called short-term AI development expectation means that in the short term, AI has not achieved strong artificial intelligence, does not have the ability to exist independently, and AI still exists as a tool to assist human intelligence and improve human production and life efficiency.
Second, many people believe that artificial intelligence does not have the unique ability of human empathy, so it can never truly replace legal workers. It is true that as the highest biological intelligence of human beings, it is always easier to empathize with the parties, and as the parties, there are indeed many needs to be empathized, and it is easier to build trust with peers; At present, artificial intelligence still does not have the ability to empathize, and it really cannot truly replace legal workers. But from another perspective, although human wisdom is easier to empathize with the client, it does not mean that lawyers can do a good job in self-emotional management and calming the emotions of others, not to mention the attitude of procurators and adjudicators towards clients. Therefore, if human intelligence and artificial intelligence are allowed to compare emotional value, even in the short-term expected development of AI, it is not necessarily that the value generated by human intelligence is much higher than the value generated by artificial intelligence. Not to mention, studies have shown that ChatGPT can understand and speculate on the practices of others to a certain extent through mental tests, which shows that it is not far away for AI to try to understand human emotions and give certain emotional guidance. We are indeed very valuable in having emotions, but if we only promote emotional value, it is obviously not enough to solve the anxiety of the job.
Therefore, we must also have an absolute advantage in legal technology to stay away from job anxiety. The basis of ChatGPT is massive reference data, but it cannot review and judge the source and accuracy of reference data, the advantages and disadvantages of content, and law students can learn more valuable legal theories, more systematic legal knowledge, and fully use logical judgment methods to find problems, analyze problems and solve problems. Lawyers and paralegals can use a variety of research methods in the research of specific legal issues, which are more in-depth and more fully reasoned; Lawyers can make full use of different expressions according to the different psychological states of the listener to achieve the purpose of persuading the other party. What is valuable and irreplaceable for legal workers is not simply the ability to accurately apply the law according to the paradigm of the case, but the ability to analyze and reason, discover problems and solve problems in cases.
More importantly, on the basis of handling each case well, legal workers have an understanding of law, economy and society, legislation, judiciary and law enforcement, legal theory and reason, social effects and legal effects, follow the changes of the times, give play to subjective initiative, imagination and creativity, promote the establishment of good laws that are more in line with the current social form, and promote the progress of a society ruled by law.
Exegesis:
[1] Kosinski,M. (2023). Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models (arXiv:2302.02083). arXiv
[2] Michael Bommarito II,Daniel Martin Katz.GPT takes the Bar Exam