AI Assistants are very promising, and as the world gets used to using these “black magic” tools to assist them, our tools here at Lex IT Limited should prove useful to anyone in the legal industry looking to offload some of their work onto an AI.
ChatGPT has been all over the internet in recent days due to its incredible conversational AI platform and the ease of use such a platform provides. If you know how to tell an assistant or an employee to accomplish a task, you can harness the capabilities of an advanced chatbot.
What can you do with it? Well, you can ask it to do something like help you spread the holiday spirit, like McSweeney’s Todd Levin has, or you can ask it to write legal submissions for you. The bot’s conversational power is extremely potent and is honestly quite scary.
Its use in academia is quite popular, as many students are using it for assistance in assignment prompts. ChatGPT can answer simple homework prompts in a concise and very helpful way. ChatGPT is very useful for answering prompts like:
What is the mitochondria?
"The mitochondria are small, circular structures found in the cytoplasm of cells. They are known as the "powerhouses" of the cell because they produce energy in the form of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is an important molecule that stores energy and provides it to the cell when needed…" says ChatGPT.
This same popularity makes it a great potential plagiarism trap for students, if multiple students in the same class use the same answer without rewriting it.
“I think while I won’t ask it to write the whole essay for me, I would use it to get over my ‘writer’s block’,” says Huang Xiuxin, a senior student at the University of Toronto.
“It helps a lot to read an opening and pick out important points to add to my own introduction. I just have to make sure to adapt it to my style…it’s the same process when I read research points to see how I should begin to structure my essay...starting a paper is the hardest part for me, but once I get the ball rolling I can easily churn out many pages…taking inspiration from the bot’s opening saves me a lot of frustration.” Huang says.
While something like ChatGPT can’t chase its own leads and write its own content without prompting, it still serves as a very useful assistant to bounce ideas off of. It never sleeps, speaks multiple languages and doesn’t get bored of doing the same task over and over again. It works when you’re working, when you need it.
In 2019, during my 3rd year of study at the University of Toronto, I made a presentation talking about how AI automation could be the future of journalism. I revealed that the script I was using for the presentation was created using an AI trained using Sung Kim’s code for Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks. I trained it using samples from speeches and presentations I wrote throughout high school and university. Tools like this are very powerful, and although they lack the creative drive and the desire to seek out knowledge, they are extremely capable in making our jobs easier.
Ever since I trained that bot, I’ve never had issues creating thesis statements and introductions, and my conclusions have since been gifted to me in a nice little wrapped present.
Would you be able to have guessed that I used that very same bot to write large chunks of this article?
AI Assistants are very promising, and as the world gets used to using these “black magic” tools to assist them, our tools here at Lex IT Limited should prove useful to anyone in the legal industry looking to offload some of their work onto an AI.
If you haven't tried it yet, try out ChatGPT here. If you work in the legal space, and would like to explore options that could help you in your work, get in touch with us.