ChatGPT and other consumer accessible AI solutions are not the answer to legal services and legal information for people who cannot afford a lawyer. They’re not even close.
They could help big time though if lawyers were the conduit from AI to consumers.
First, from Stanford University why AI is not the answer for legal services.
As reported by Bloomberg’s Isabel Gottlieb and Isaiah Poritz,
Popular AI chatbots from OpenAI Inc., Google LLC, and Meta Platforms Inc. are prone to “hallucinations” when answering legal questions, posing special risks for people using the technology because they can’t afford a human lawyer, new research from Stanford University said.
Large language models hallucinate at least 75% of the time when answering questions about a court’s core ruling, the researchers found. They tested more than 200,000 legal questions on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5, Google’s PaLM 2, and Meta’s Llama 2—all general-purpose models not built for specific legal use.
Generative artificial intelligence has raised hopes that the powerful technology can help provide legal services to people who can’t afford a lawyer. According to the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation, low-income people in the US received inadequate or no help for 92% of civil legal issues they face.
But AI’s inaccuracies could put a damper on those hopes, warned Stanford researchers, who published a preprint study at the start of the year and announced their findings in a blog Jan. 11.
“The big finding here is that the hallucination rates are not isolated, they’re pretty pervasive,” said Daniel Ho, a law professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the school’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, who co-authored the research paper.”
But what if we used AI to expedite lawyers creating niche information for consumers by state – and even jurisdiction.
GPT works extraordinarily well as an idea generator, assistant and editor. Ask it what subjects to cover, what topics within those subjects to cover, maybe even to help draft bulleted or paragraphed answers.
The lawyers are at the wheel through as they have knowledge of the subject. They’ll make sure the information is accurate.
Get the info out on a niche blog and aggregate the content by state. You’ll have an accessible encyclopaedia of legal info. Something we’ve not had, because it’s taken too much time.
Bring AI, lawyers and a desire to help together and you’ll have something. Lawyers will even build a name and visibility in the process.
A win all the way around, Lucky says, as he heads off to sleep.
