ChatGPT: implications for the legal world - Internet for Lawyers Newsletter

Chatbots have been around since the 1960s and coders have been trying to pass the Turing test ever since, creating increasingly sophisticated iterations of natural language processing (NLP) software. A recent episode, where a Google engineer was sacked for claiming that the search engine's chatbot generator software known as LaMDA was sentient, perhaps demonstrates the leaps and bounds that NLP has made over the past few years. However, it's only with the public release of a new chatbot called ChatGPT that the potential of NLP has been taken seriously by the wider public. ChatGPT is a conversational piece of software released by OpenAI, designed to answer questions posed in natural language and even have a dialogue with users. It has been trained on a multitude of online data from Wikipedia to Reddit, although the information is only correct up until 2021. As well as answering general queries and therefore being a potential threat to Google, it also has the ability to write bespoke articles on any topic which is sparking off existential debates amongst academics and professional writers.