Extract from Alex Anteau’s article “Why Lawyers Will Survive the Onset of Generative AI—and How They’ll Affect Who Won’t”
Generative artificial intelligence is coming for jobs in a swath of industries, but lawyers probably won’t be on that list, according to Yuri Eliezer of boutique intellectual property firm Founders Legal.
“Lawyers write the laws and I don’t think [they] are going to let AI represent you in court,” Eliezer said discussing the current major copyright, patent and privacy cases pending against generative AI companies at a presentation hosted by his firm at Atlanta Tech Village, a local startup incubator.
However, lawyers are still playing a key role in shaping how AI is handled everywhere from state courts to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “For software developers, authors, writers, artists and photographers, there is a problem,” Eliezer continued. “Jobs are at risk, and as you see in the various complaints filed, this is the main theme.”
But even if legal careers aren’t on the chopping block, as generative AI becomes more ingrained in the workplace questions still persist: if user inputs are used to train models such as ChatGPT, can lawyers input their clients confidential information when generating motions, briefs or patent applications? How does scraped data used to train AI co-exist with the right to be forgotten? And when it comes to filing patents and copyrights for works produced by AI, in Eliezer’s words, “Who owns it?”
