Using AI is like taking legal advice from a man in a pub. You might come away with some good tips. Though you wouldn’t want to trust his advice without first checking it out. Particularly if you are preparing a case for trial. But so many lawyers seem to do just that. Particularly those still at the learning end. They’re the ones getting caught out. But it is usually their employer who gets the grief.
Think of AI as an advanced search engine. It does more than simply searching out internet content and presenting it to you as a series of links. It goes further by mashing up that content and then reconstituting it as its own work. So is it surprising that AI sometimes gets it wrong? And there’s another thing. Everything downloadable from the internet is somebody else’s intellectual property. So when you are reusing that mashed up content and passing it off as your own work, you are opening yourself up to a damages claim.
Don’t get me wrong. I sometimes use AI myself. But only a starting point. I might ask it to list out some cases relevant to the matter with which I am dealing. I will then go on to the BAILII website and search out those cases and download the PDFs. But sometimes my AI has responded with an answer which I know is wrong. So I will always defer to my own professional judgment. Because that’s what I’m paid to do. And yes – I can always sense when something has been written by AI.
BRUCE AND HOLLY 