The Atlanta Lawyer April/May 2023 Vol 21, No 6 | Page 14

IN THE PROFESSION
PHOTO CREDIT : PEXELS

ChatGPT – What ' s the Buzz ?

______________________________________________________________ The Atlanta Lawyer Asked Experts What Can Be Expected from the Notorious Chatbot .
Panelists interviewed for the following article were Paula J . Frederick ( State Bar of Georgia ), Karla Grossenbacher ( Seyfarth Shaw LLP ), Jon Neiditz ( Kilpatrick Townsend ), and Matt Wetherington ( Wetherington Law Firm ).

ChatGPT , Open AI ’ s chatbot has disrupted the competitive marketplace – and the legal world . The newest “ adversarial ” version ( that is not available to the public yet ) passed the bar exam , and a legal company called DoNotPay supposedly trained the tool to present oral argument before the Supreme Court . Artificial intelligence ( AI ), so it seems , has high ambitions and is ready to enter the practice of law . Or is it ?

TAL : As lawyers , our priority is or should be to deliver reliable results . Previously developed AI tools , such as Harvey , were criticized for not understanding nuance . How accurate is ChatGPT ’ s output ? What does it do when it does not know the answer ?
Frederick : ChatGPT seems to learn from its mistakes . It can refine its responses based on newer information . Unfortunately , it sometimes gives you an answer that is wrong ! And even when it is right , the answer may not be complete .
Neiditz : Yes , it will " make things up " and get facts wrong , so its results are at most suggestions that need to be verified . ChatGPT operates on a turn-by-turn basis , meaning it doesn ’ t have a full understanding of the context of a conversation . This can lead to inaccuracies in its responses , especially when answering questions that require background knowledge .
TAL : Which means that a lawyer will still have to review the results .
Neiditz : Exactly . Lawyers should bear in mind that the current version 3.5 of ChatGPT can almost never deliver competent counsel in areas in which the laws and concerns are in a constant state of flux , such as privacy and data security , because it was trained on a dataset that existed in 2021 . Uses of ChatGPT by lawyers without appropriate supervision and oversight of the technology are likely to spark claims of unauthorized practice of
14 April / May 2023