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FWIW, I work in a highly technical area of law and am recognized as an expert.
Every couple of months, I feed a question into AI. While it certainly has gotten better (especially when there is a precise clean answer), most of the time it misses a key consideration or mucks up the answer somehow. Frequently it gets distracted on something totally unimportant. I’ve yet had it give an answer to a reasonably complex question that I wouldn’t chew out a fellow partner on if I was their tech reviewer when reviewing for quality.
But like you that doesn’t mean there isn’t value. Sometimes I need to find data in a financial statement. Telling it to make a chart from that data and then spot checking saves times. But it’s not ready to replace me or even the people a few rungs below me (though maybe entry level)
Yeah, this has been about my experience.
Are you using any of the legal harnesses (e.g. Harvey)?
One of the things that is a little annoying is that it's very hard to tell exactly how well something will perform (or muck up) without a lot of stress-testing, which takes up more time than you would save if it works as advertised. Although on the plus side the need to do stress testing is probably at the end of the day nice for my job security, so there is that.
Harvey is used more for SPAs. It adds some but still comes back with laughable results sometimes.
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