Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Criminal Law

You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by the company Open AI. The most recent version of Open AI’s product, GPT-4, “scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT . . . and did even better on the [Uniform Bar Exam] by scoring in the 90th percentile.” More details here, but this might reasonably make criminal lawyers wonder whether we could be replaced by AI. It almost happened already. The first “robot lawyer” was supposed to debut this spring. An AI startup called DoNotPay planned to equip two litigants challenging their traffic tickets with smart glasses. The glasses would enable a litigant to record what the judge said, feed that into an AI, and hear suggested responses through an earpiece. After threats from various state bar officials suggesting that the company would be engaged in the unauthorized practice of law, the company backed away from its plans, as NPR reports here. Now it has it the defendant in a civil suit accusing it of the unauthorized practice of law, according to Reuters. Some applications are pretty obvious. Robot lawyers might not be here yet but you’re already using AI when you do legal research on Westlaw. According to this article: [AI] has been seamlessly woven into . . . research services . . . [like] Westlaw Edge, launched by Thomson Reuters more than three years ago. The keyword or boolean search approach that was the hallmark of the service for decades has been augmented by semantic search. This [...]