Focus on Ethics & Civility: the Day Your Life Changed Forever

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Pages: 53
• Citation: Vol. 36 No. 2 Pg. 53
• Publication year: 2023

Focus on Ethics & Civility: The Day Your Life Changed Forever Vol. 36 No. 2 Pg. 53 Utah Bar Journal April, 2023

March, 2023

Focus on Ethics & Civility

The Day Your Life Changed Forever

by Keith A. Call

You may not know this, but on November 30, 2022, your life changed forever. On that day, a previously little-known software company based in San Francisco released ChatGPT, a chatbot that is designed to be able to "converse" with humans on a variety of topics using natural language. It uses machine learning (artificial intelligence) to generate responses to user input, allowing it to have "conversations" that are similar to what humans might have.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to "explain Ferris Bueller's Day Off as an existentialist text while drawing thematic parallels between the film and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis." The chatbot will write a pretty impressive essay for you! This is a high school teacher's and college professor's nightmare.

The use of chatbots, including ChatGPT, in the law raises a number of ethical concerns. One major concern is the potential for chatbots to perpetuate biases and discrimination. For example, if a chatbot is trained on biased data, it may perpetuate those biases in its responses and decision-making. This could lead to unfair treatment of individuals or groups of people based on their race, gender, age, or other characteristics.

Another ethical concern related to the use of chatbots in the law is the potential for them to erode privacy and confidentiality. Chatbots may collect and store sensitive personal information about individuals, which could be accessed by unauthorized parties or used for purposes other than those for which it was collected. This could have serious consequences for individuals, particularly in the...