Should You Use ChatGPT to Create Content For Your Law Firm’s Website?
Date: September 1, 2023
Five Risks of Using ChatGPT to Create Your Law Firm’s Content
ChatGPT can be an amazing tool when used appropriately. However, sometimes when it sounds too good to be true, it just might be. Now, we’ll dive into some risks of using ChatGPT to create your law firm’s content.Information is Often Inaccurate
In short, ChatGPT cannot keep up with the complexity of the laws and regulations both on the federal and state levels. In fact, this has recently gotten a New York attorney in serious trouble when they used ChaptGPT for their federal court filing and the tool cited at least six cases that did not even exist. This is why it is critical that if you are using ChatGPT to write your firm’s content you double and triple-check what information it has generated to ensure it is accurate otherwise the consequences can be grave.Reputable Websites Can Now Block AI
Recently, OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, announced that website owners can now block its crawlers from scraping their site to train their AI models. In fact, the New York Times has decided to block ChatGPT from crawling the content on their website in order to train their AI systems, and if I had to speculate, other major publications will likely do the same. This means that ChatGPT’s algorithm will likely continue to have inaccuracies or miss important information as more reputable websites begin to block OpenAI’s crawlers from using their content to train the AI model.Ownership is a Grey Area
If you’re an intellectual property attorney, you may have already noticed the legal complications AI-generated content creates due to the ownership of the content being a gray area. In fact, there have been recent lawsuits of authors suing Open AI for providing too-accurate summaries of their works. The lawsuit alleges that “much” of OpenAI’s training data stems from copyrighted materials. I suspect other lawsuits like this will continue to come up in the future as AI forces us to face unprecedented times when it comes to intellectual property laws. With all of that said, it’s important to remember that if you do decide to use ChatGPT, make sure you update whatever you take from it to be unique.Lacks Creativity and Uniqueness
When using ChatGPT to write your legal content, it’s important to remember that what it is generating may not be unique or bring to light new ideas that you’d be able to do if you were to write something yourself. So, when reviewing AI-generated content, be sure to add your own twist to what was generated. Additionally, it is important for you to establish your firm’s tone of voice so that it is consistent across all of your firm’s content on the website.Human Editing is Required
It’s not unusual to want to do something yourself because it will save you time in the long run. It’s important to bear that principle in mind should you choose to use ChatGPT to write your legal content because as we mentioned before, you must proofread whatever ChatGPT generates for you– otherwise there can be serious consequences.How ChatGPT Can Be Used for Your Law Firm’s Content
Despite there being some major risks of using ChatGPT to create your law firm’s content, there are some ways in which the tool can be extremely useful. Below we will dive into some of the ways in which ChatGPT can help with your legal content writing process.- Generating topic ideas – If you are stuck on what to write about, ChatGPT can be a great place to start brainstorming some topic ideas for blog articles.
- Rephrasing a sentence or paragraph – If you write something out but don’t like the way it sounds, ChatGPT can be an excellent tool to use for rephrasing what you have already written to see if you can find wording that works better.
- Getting the writing process started – If you are stuck on where to begin, ChatGPT can be a great place to get your creative juices flowing to get inspiration and start writing.
