Getting Up to Speed on AI and ChatGPT
By Paul Dumansky, Proposal and Strategic Content Manager at Crowell & Moring LLP
Unless you have taken up residence in a monastery or otherwise ostracized yourself from society for the prior six months, chances are you have at least heard of ChatGPT and similar AI tools, even if you have never used them. For those of you who need an introduction to ChatGPT or would like to learn more about it and the impact that it may have on your career (and your life, in general), we present the following resources for your perusal.
What Is ChatGPT and Why Does It Matter? Here’s What You Need to Know (ZDNET)
Summary: In November 2022, the research company OpenAI created ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology. ChatGPT allows you to prompt the chatbot with a question, to which it will provide a detailed answer based on information it has sourced online, and you can engage in “human-like conversations” and much more with the chatbot. ChatGPT is free to use for now (though there is a $20/month subscription option with added features) and is being used to compose essays, write code, build resumes, draft Excel formulas, have philosophical conversations, and for many other purposes. Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, mused, “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”
ChatGPT: 30 Incredible Ways to Use the AI-Powered Chatbot (Interesting Engineering)
Summary: Getting started with ChatGPT is relatively straightforward. Aside from the uses previously identified, it can offer answers to challenging personal questions, simplify complex ideas, perform translation, extract data from text, grade essays, find security holes, help develop a business idea, provide statistics for presentations, create short biographies, etc. Despite being in existence for only seven months, ChatGPT has already demonstrated its utility in numerous areas, making individuals and organizations eager to explore how it can be leveraged to improve their performance or create more efficiencies.
11 ChatGPT Alternatives You Can Try in 2023 (Search Engine Journal)
Summary: While ChatGPT has been dominating the headlines, there are many other chatbots available to try. One of the reasons for using a ChatGPT alternative is to gain access to more advanced features; e.g., many offer sentiment analysis and speech recognition capabilities that can help businesses create personalized conversations with customers. Google Bard is an experimental AI conversational service that’s powered by Google’s LAMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Among many others, there’s also Microsoft Bing’s new chat, codenamed Sydney, and Jasper.ai, a conversational AI platform that operates on the cloud and offers powerful natural language understanding (NLU) and dialog management capabilities.
New Report on ChatGPT & Generative AI in Law Firms Shows Opportunities Abound, Even as Concerns Persist (Thomson Reuters)
Summary: A large majority (82%) of those surveyed said they believe that ChatGPT and generative AI can be readily applied to legal work. A slightly smaller majority (51%) said that ChatGPT and generative AI should be applied to legal work. As of April 2023, actual use among law firms was quite limited, with just 3% of respondents saying they are actually using generative AI right now, and about 15% of respondents said their firms have warned employees against unauthorized generative AI use at work. However, many legal industry observers expect that time and experimentation will make users more comfortable with these tools, and a day will come (likely sooner than later) when generative AI and ChatGPT is in as common use within law firms as online legal research and electronic contract signing are now. While not a replacement for legal work, conversational AI can automate routine tasks such as document review and contract analysis for lawyers, and help them perform legal research and writing much more efficiently, while law firms also can use it to create blog posts and social media content for marketing purposes, as described in How Lawyers Can Take Advantage of ChatGPT and Other Large Language Models Disrupting the Legal Industry (ABA Journal).
The Dangers of ChatGPT: How It Can Put You at Risk (OpenGrowth)
Summary: ChatGPT has the potential to be revolutionary, but there are numerous dangers. Among those of most prominence are the generation of inaccurate information, privacy issues, biased content, job displacement, plagiarism, the possible proliferation in the production of phishing emails, the creating of malware, the lack of context in some of its answers, and a potential for people to become over-dependent on the tool.
Gartner Identifies Six ChatGPT Risks Legal and Compliance Leaders Must Evaluate (Gartner)
Summary: Covering much of the same ground as the prior article, this one specifically focuses on some of the legal implications of ChatGPT, among them the IP and copyright risks, as well as consumer protection concerns. Also addressed are cyber fraud risks, a topic addressed more thoroughly in The New Risks ChatGPT Poses to Cybersecurity (Harvard Business Review). Manipulation of ChatGPT is possible (despite being designed to not be used for offensive purposes) and with enough creative poking and prodding, bad actors may be able to trick the AI into writing malicious code.