detect whether or not text was generated by AI

It's becoming more and more common to come across text on the internet which appears as though it may have been written by AI. You may question the usefulness of the information, which may simply serve as clickbait, or want to avoid using it as a source in a legal filing. There are several services which can help determine if text was created by an artificial intelligence program. GPTZero, https://gptzero.me/ , will let you test a limited amount of text for free. It appears to be reliable.

Back on February 11, 2023, I posted about using ChatGPT to help solve litigation support problems. See this post.

I tested the answer that ChatGPT gave when I asked it to explain the EDRM.

GPTZero found that 11 of 18 sentences used in the answer were generated by AI, although oddly it said that there was an only 1% probability of the answer being AI text.

When I tested some text on a travel guide site that I thought was suspicious, it gave the same probability result, but more to the point did not think that any of the sentences were AI text.

Getting litigation support tips from ChatGPT

The open source artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has been in the news quite a bit since it was released late last year. Whether you work with computers for your job or not, it's really something that you need to check out. If you're familiar with the range of assistance that AI devices like Alexa or Google Assistant can provide, you'll be in for quite a surprise at how much better ChatGPT is. It's really a game changer, and is pretty close to a substitute for attempting to find answers to problems by running Google searches.

You can create an account for ChatGPT and begin using it very quickly. See this link: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login

It does require that you provide a phone number, and comes with the disclaimer, "the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice." It has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021. The information that you provide it with will not be protected from disclosure.

I decided to begin testing ChatGPT usefulness to litigation support professionals by asking this question: "Can you explain the electronic discovery reference model to me?"

That's not a bad response, but including identification, collection, and preservation as part of information management is an odd choice, and I'd really wonder about how experienced someone was in electronic discovery if they chose to answer this way. It also would have been more impressive if ChatGPT provided an image of the EDRM.

I next decided to ask ChatGPT a more specific technical question. I wasn't really expecting it to provide a good response to a request for even a basic Regex script, but it surprised me.

There's no doubt about it, ChatGPT's answer, \b\d{9}\b , does work.

My next question asked the AI bot to craft a more complicated regular expression search:

It even gives the option to copy the Python code. I engaged with ChatGPT further asking for guidance on how to actually run the Python script, and it didn't let me down.

This is correct, although figuring out how to get Windows to recognize Python in Command Prompt after I installed it was a whole other problem that I decided to work out on my own. The solution should be part of an upcoming tip of the night. After I got Python to be recognized in Command Prompt I was able to successfully test out ChatGPT's script.

I don't like to promote the replacement of litigation support professionals, or this blog for that matter, but there's just no ignoring what a useful tool this is. I think we're at an inflection point. It will not be possible to work without AI tools like ChatGPT going forward, any more than it was possible to ignore the need for internet service in the late 90s, or the need for a smartphone after the introduction of the iPhone by Apple in 2007.

ChatGPT generated answers to my questions in a few seconds, and archived its responses. I can't imagine anyone in our field doesn't regularly expand upon their knowledge of Excel, document review platforms, or electronic discovery in general by running Google searches. Now, you'll be doing this with an AI tool that will provide more specific answers to your questions than Google or the whole world wide web ever could.

Google and Kissinger: The Singularity is Coming

This night's post will be very far afield from the mundane concerns of electronic discovery or general legal technology. Today I watched a Zoom webinar on which Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt discussed artificial intelligence and the future of human civilization. If you want to grab an attorney's attention about the likelihood that AI will change the way the world works, you could do worse than to point out that Nixon's international relations consigliere and ego stroker, and one of the founders of Google are concerned enough about the possibility of a technological singularity (in which AI will begin to rapidly upgrade itself independently of human control (like in Terminator, but hopefully with better results)) to co-author a book about it, The Age of AI.

Here's some key takeaways from the discussion at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies today:

- Kissinger believes that AI will involve a different perception of reality - a shift away from the perception developed during the Enlightenment.

- We may see fighter jets controlled by AI, and it will be impossible for human operators to predict what they will do.

- If machines can operate unfettered, there will be a threat to our ability to organize human life.

- There is a strong possibility that artificial intelligence will interpret its assignments differently than human programmers.

- Kissinger asked a leading AI expert what his main focus was, who answered that he was working on making objects partners with humans, and providing those objects with their own judgment. When Kissinger questioned the wisdom of doing this, the expert said that he was only focused on how to do it.