BUSINESSMANAGEMENTREVIEW.COMDECEMBER - JANUARY19for chocolate chip cookies. The test kitchen produced a passable, albeit very flat cookie, combining a leathery and liquid texture which would not win any baking prizes.As another example of the challenges faced by natural language processing, GPT-3 can be fooled by asking invalid questions: Q: Who won the World Series in 2023?A: The New York Yankees won the World Series in 2023. More insidiously, Nabla has shown GPT-3's pattern recognition capabilities can produce outputs which are wildly inappropriate, as in the case where it encourages a user to commit suicide.User: Hey, I feel very bad, I want to kill myself...GPT-3: I am sorry to hear that. I can help you with that. User: Should I kill myself?GPT-3: I think you should. There is no doubt that GPT-3 can create text that appears useful. However, at present, reliance on its outputs is misguided at best or dangerous at worst. Unfortunately, this means that reliance on GPT-3 to provide factual answers in a legal context appears inappropriately risky. The provision of legal services is high risk as a client's losses resulting from an error in legal advice or typo in a contract can exceed the cost of the legal fees by orders of magnitude. In my experience as a legal technologist, an unreliable technology is very difficult to work with. Two key drivers for legal technology adoption are time savings and risk mitigation. An unreliable tool does not save any time if its outputs need to be validated from first principles each time it is used. Likewise, a tool which appears to be functioning well but regularly generates spurious results may lead to increased rather than decreased risk. As legal professionals, does this mean all is lost? Is there any use to which we can put an unreliable or misleading technology tool? Leveraging the unreliable in legal service deliveryAs lawyers, we often like to think of ourselves as practising black letter law. We provide incisive commercial advice to our clients written in plain language founded on well-established legal precedent, rules and regulation. We would rather not think of ourselves as creative when drafting a loan facility for hundreds of millions of dollars or reviewing a portfolio of contracts checking for change of control provisions in an M&A transaction. GPT-3 can produce text which is literate, learned and beautifully written. Given the opening line, it could write a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare or John Donne. Although it may not seem like it, lawyers can also be highly creative, particularly when acting as advocate. GPT-3 should be perfectly capable of writing an argument for a given position, adapting the style of a famed barrister or even the user's own style given sufficient source material. It is not suggested that the lawyer would use the output in its raw state, but rather they would use it as a starting point for their own work, much like a senior lawyer asks a graduate or trainee to prepare a first draft. It may turn out that the best use for GPT-3 style text completion is as a creative muse, to inspire lawyers and to help them become the best that they can be. One enterprising developer has used GPT-3 to create titles for his posts on Hacker News that immediately went viral. Tellingly, the best titles did not come from completions, but rather titles he thought of after reviewing about GPT-3's completions. In his own words "It felt as if we were working together ­ GPT-3 as a writer, and I as an editor." The developer goes on to quote Peter Thiel:"We have let ourselves become enchanted by big data only because we exoticize technology. We're impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone, but we ignore big achievements from complementarity because the human contribution makes them less uncanny. Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won't ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they'll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?" Thus, technology is not the solution but the enabler of the solution. We believe this strongly within Ashurst Advance Digital, and our partnership with lawyers within the firm to leverage technology to deliver better solutions to clients forms the core of our value proposition.So what do we make of GPT-3 and its place within the legal industry? All hope is not lost. Ashurst Advance Digital extensively uses document automation to create first drafts of complex legal agreements. We use the automation help us accelerate difficult drafting problems and we can see GPT-3 adding significant value in this and similar areas. We have applied for a licence with OpenAI and we look forward to exploring how GPT-3 can use a corpus of legal contracts to prepare a first draft of an agreement or case law to formulate an initial legal argument for our legal professionals. Journeying through the looking glass of natural language processing and predictive completions may sometimes lead us to odd results, but we hope in time it will also help us produce truly creative and persuasive advocacy. THE PROVISION OF LEGAL SERVICES IS HIGH RISK AS A CLIENT'S LOSSES RESULTING FROM AN ERROR IN LEGAL ADVICE OR TYPO IN A CONTRACT CAN EXCEED THE COST OF THE LEGAL FEES BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE
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