The Law Society of New Zealand has warned lawyers about the use of AI chatbot ChatGPT for obtaining basic legal guidance and information. While the chatbot has access to a lot of online legal material and can draft legal documents quickly, its responses have been labelled imperfect and problematic.
The article also highlights the regulatory and ethical issues that may arise from using an AI tool for law-related services. The Law Society Libraries have received case requests from practitioners generated after submitting a query to the chatbot. However, investigations have found that the cases requested were fictitious. ChatGPT uses a statistical model based on probability to guess the next word, sentence, and paragraph to match the context provided by the user. It may fabricate facts and sources where it does not have access to sufficient data.