Page 4 - ACTL_Fall23

PLEASE SEND CONTRIBUTIONS OR SUGGESTIONS TO ACTLJOURNAL@GMAIL.COM
THEY’RE COMING FOR US. THE MACHINES. THE MACHINES ARE COMING FOR US. NOT FOR MANKIND. LAWYERS. THEY’RE COMING FOR LAWYERS. THEY PLAN TO FULFILL SHAKE- SPEARE’S INVECTIVE “FIRST, LET’S KILL ALL THE LAWYERS.”
In April, the New York Times featured a story with the chilling headline “A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers.” “A new A.I. threat looms,” the Times reports, “ChatGPT-style software, with its hu- manlike language fluency, could take over much of legal work . . . Law is seen as the profession perhaps most at risk from the recent advances in A.I. because lawyers are essentially word merchants. And the new technology can recognize and analyze words and generate text in an instant. It seems ready and able to perform tasks that are the bread and butter of lawyers.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that AI will not simply replace us, it will be smarter, way smarter than most of us hu- mans. Most of us, not all. A few of us will remain poor dumb bastards. Read Steve Schwarz’ story (p. 25) about the lawyers who used AI to write a brief; and AI wrote a great brief, apart from the fact that it simply made up the cited cases. AI was smart enough to create a good-looking brief; the humans were too dumb to cite-check.
But while AI may be artificial, it is intelligent. In March, a paper was published by a group of law school professors with the mod- est title “GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam.” GPT-4 (the AI program created by OpenAI) didn’t just pass. It aced it. The Uniform Bar Exam has been adopted in over forty U.S. states and territories. A twelve-hour, two-day ordeal with multiple choice and essay questions, a perfect score is 400. A passing score, in most of the states that use it, is 270. GPT-4 scored 297, putting it in the 90th
percentile. And in dog-years, GPT-4 is still an infant. GPT-5 will score higher. GPT-6 will probably get a 400.
What? A machine can answer essay questions? It’s almost as smart as us already and will soon be smarter? Holy Terminator! Save us, Sarah Connor! That’s terrible news.
We have to do something!!!!
Okay, let’s take a breath. The plot line of the Termina- tor Franchise is that the machines created by mankind become too smart for our own good and decide to elim- inate their creators. Is that what AI is on the cusp of doing? Is war between intelligence and artificial intelli- gence inevitable? Are we doomed?
3
JOURNAL
What is intelligence? What is artificial intelligence? What we really mean when we talk about artificial intelligence is that it is distinct from, different than human intelli- gence. But that’s too blunt a distinction. Animals aren’t artificial. Ask anyone who has ever owned or met a dog whether an animal can exhibit intelligence. All animals have some level of intelligence. What differentiates us from other animals is the ability to create and use tools. No, wait, that’s not true. Chimpanzees use tools, even
No. AI isn’t a rival species.
It’s a tool. A tool created by humans. To do what all tools do – to make human life easier.
It is not a threat. It’s a tool.
An opportunity.