The Implications of ChatGPT For Legal Services and Society

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT.1 To demonstrate the chatbot’s sophistication and its potential implications, both for legal services and society more generally, most of this paper was generated in about an hour through prompts within ChatGPT. Only this abstract, the preface, the outline headers, the footnotes, the epilogue, and the prompts were written by a person. ChatGPT generated the rest of the text with no human editing. To be clear, the responses generated by ChatGPT were imperfect and at times problematic, and the use of an AI tool for law-related services raises a host of regulatory and ethical issues.

At the same time, ChatGPT highlights the promise of artificial intelligence, including its ability to affect our lives in both modest and more profound ways. ChatGPT suggests an imminent reimagination of how we access and create information, obtain legal and other services, and prepare people for their careers. We also will soon face new questions about the role of knowledge workers in society, the attribution of work (e.g., determining when people’s written work is their own), and the potential misuse of and excessive reliance on the information produced by these kinds of tools. The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future.

They have arrived, and this document offers a small taste of what lies ahead.