Being married to a techie who was once a lawyer, and not without a degree of self-interest I have recently spent a good number of hours musing over the impact of GPT on the future of the legal profession.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer (memorise it, this will soon be a quiz question) and is a type of language model that uses deep learning to generate human-like, conversational text. GPT 1 and 2 were interesting experiments, GPT 3.5 or ChatGPT was impressive, but the recently-launched GPT 4 has been hailed across the globe as an absolute game-changer.
As a self-proclaimed tech sceptic – if it’s not flawless, I don’t want it – I wasn’t initially worried. I was impressed by GPT as a concept, but the first few times playing around with it did not make me fear for my job. The numerous GPT clangers circulating on social media did not trouble this view (my personal favorite is the one where it provides in moments an impressive list of how to distinguish between a chicken’s egg and a cow’s egg).
But then in March there was a report by Goldman Sachs, predicting that lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant through the march of GPT. This was intriguing, because previously all the reports about artificial intelligence had told us that lawyers did not need to fear for their job, as the language skills of even really good artificial intelligence were fairly bad. However, with this new prediction, mere scepticism is...
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