Extract from Nick Hafen’s article “What Law Students Should Know About Generative AI Before Their Summer Jobs”
For law school students preparing to start their summer jobs, internships, externships and clerkships, now is the time to get up to speed on the latest in legal technology: generative AI (GenAI).
Your employer may be excited about, opposed to, or oblivious to this relatively new and rapidly evolving technology. In any of those cases, you can impress your employer and distinguish yourself from other job candidates by being familiar with the basics of GenAI technology, how it can empower legal professionals and potential hazards to watch out for.
1. Know some basics about how the technology works.
- GenAI is a prediction engine, not a search engine. It’s a mathematical model of language that’s trained to predict the next word based on mountains of training text. If you ask one of these large language models (LLMs), “What is the capital of France?” it tells you “Paris” because it’s learned from its training data that Paris is a highly likely response to those words in that order.
- General-use tools like ChatGPT may give you very realistic (enough to fool many lawyers) but very fake legal citations because they’ve been trained to excel at producing realistic text. Companies try to avoid these “hallucinations”—with mixed success—by having the AI tools perform a web search or by training the models not to answer legal questions.
