Caretha Perry has been a paralegal for more than 20 years, mostly with a legal division of the U.S. Army. Generative artificial intelligence wasn’t really on her radar until a couple of months ago, when she took a “critical thinking” workshop the Army was offering.
Her instructor had ChatGPT up on the classroom projector and told it she wanted song lyrics that were a blend of Madonna and Stephen King.
“It started creating this Stephen King-ish Madonna song,” Perry said. “It was pretty good, what it was typing, you know?”
Most amazing was just how fast the AI was writing all of this.
“And I just thought, ‘This is replacement,'” Perry said. “‘This would replace Madonna, this would replace a Stephen King, this is gonna replace a lot of people.”
Marketplace
Hosted by Kai Ryssdal
Latest Episodes
Including, maybe, her.
Paralegals don’t typically spend their workdays creating Madonna-Stephen King mashups.
But a lot of Perry’s job is writing and research. Looking up a statute or case law, seeing if it’s relevant to what her boss wants, taking a first pass at a brief. Those are the parts of the job she enjoys the most, and the parts new legal AI tools are already pretty good at.
Her boss has joked about this with her.
“He had already said, ‘I just open up the software, I type in, I want cases, statutes, you know? I’ve got it...
By MELISSA GOLDIN In April, President Donald Trump announced a project to revamp the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hiring a contractor to coat its massive granite basin at a cost of what he sa...