A mere two months after launch, Chat GPT had an estimated 100 million users. Four months later, it was one billion people. This overnight success has sparked tremendous excitement about the potential of artificial intelligence and chatbots like ChatGPT. As promising as the technology is, it important to understand just what it can and cannot do today.
An egregious example of the limitations of ChatGPT is the story of how New York City lawyer, Steven A. Schwartz is currently facing sanctions for his misuse of the famous chatbot. He found himself in hot water after it was discovered that several cases cited in a recent filing did not exist. His explanation for the fictional case law citations was that he used ChatGPT to “supplement the legal research” and that chatbot had “revealed itself to be unreliable.” ChatGPT manufactured great sounding case law to support the legal arguments and Mr. Schwartz apparently neglected to verify the facts of the cases with more trusted sources. He says he asked the chatbot to confirm if the cases were real, was assured by the bot that they were and then presented the chatbot-generated fiction as fact to the court.
At the risk of understating the power of the technology, ChatGPT is effectively “autocomplete on steroids.” But, instead of attempting to complete your sentences, it will use the data it’s been trained on to respond to your questions or requests. These responses are often impressive and helpful. Unfortunately, the technology currently tends to “hallucinate.” Hallucinations are a common issue with these new chatbots where they make things up and confidently present this information as fact. Fighting hallucinations is an area of substantial active research.
If you have not tried ChatGPT, I encourage you to try it out. Just do not use this to create any pleadings! There is a free version as well as a paid one, but there is no version which is hallucination free, not yet at least. I’ve experimented quite a bit with ChatGPT, Bing Chat (which uses ChatGPT technology in an interesting way), and Google Bard. My team currently uses the technology in a limited fashion for certain items today.
No chatbot was used in the creation of this article! I wrote it all myself.
If you have any questions about Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, or technology in general, email me at dkinsey@totalnetworks.com.
