Are our law students ‘robot proof’? AI chatbots and the future of working with computer generated copyrighted works.
Smartt, Ursula (2024) Are our law students ‘robot proof’? AI chatbots and the future of working with computer generated copyrighted works. In: HEA Conference in Teaching & Learning, 27.2.24, Birmingham. (Submitted)
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT are now being used by university law students to write their coursework essays and cheat in examinations. Whilst there is tremendous scope of large language models to revolutionise the legal workspace and reduce tedious fact-checking by law trainees and paralegals, we need to teach our future lawyers to fact-check their AI-generated work for garbage, including sources which simply do not exist, such as President Biden’s counter terrorism strategy when writing about Lord Hoffmann’s dissenting judgment in the ‘Belmarsh’ case (2004). This paper advances that students need to learn how to use such large AI language model chatbots properly, how they will need to understand them in their future legal workplace and equally how they may well breach copyright which can amount to a criminal offence in the UK and the wider world. The opinion expressed in this paper includes examples from the author’s own law teaching practices and assessments. Given the acceptance and acknowledgement that our law students will use AI to ‘deceive’ their tutors and examiners, HE policy needs to address both, how to disrupt this practice by addressing academic misconduct as well as engender a way how we can educate our future lawyers to become robot-proof, where human potential includes reflection of reality and fact, whilst at the same time preparing legal trainees for the future legal workspace without cheating via AI.
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