Opinion: How Legal Community Takes on ChatGPT?

ChatGPT, a universal chatbot developed by artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, was officially launched on November 30, 2022. In just two months, ChatGPT's global registered users exceeded 100 million, and ChatGPT and related topics have been trending in many searching lists.

Why is ChatGPT so popular? How will it affect human society? How does the legal community view and respond to the impacts brought by ChatGPT?

In such context, experts and scholars from Tianjin University’s Law School held an academic seminar themed on “ChatGPT and Legal Community’s Response” on February 10, 2023 and had an indepth discussion about it.

To help participants have a better understanding of ChatGPT on technical level, the seminar invited Associate Professor Wang Bo and Associate Professor David from the Department of Intelligent Computing to give a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to ChatGPT, covering its development and evolution, the relevant technical principles, its novelty in terms of knowledge production mode, expressions and interaction, and the related ethical and legal issues.

Then, experts and scholars from the Law School expressed their views and understandings about ChatGPT from various perspectives.

Professor Zhang Hengshan suggested that ChatGPT can be a double-edged sword in education and the key lies on how it is used. On the one hand, ChatGPT breeds potential academic fraud, plagiarism, and infringement of intellectual property rights, given its capability of generating original articles, papers, stories and even poems, based on users’ instructions. He worried more about the effect ChatGPT might have on young generation as it may undermine students’ initiative to learn and do schoolwork by themselves if they use too much of ChatGPT in dealing with academic assignments and exams.

However, on the other hand, Professor Zhang deemed that ChatGPT would bring incalculable benefits to education. “I think it will force China to renovate its educational ideology and methods that highlight knowledge storage and accumulation through memorizing, and free students, especially those in primary and middle school, from tedious, challenging and time-consuming memory work.”

Prof. Zhang further elaborated that due to the interactive nature of the program, ChatGPT will encourage children to seek active learning, which should be the development trend of our education. “ChatGPT will also be of great help to college students and graduate students in academic writing since it can provide referential frameworks, theme viewpoints, and data sources for a thesis, saving researchers a lot of time which can be invested on something more creative and innovative.

Chair Professor Xiong Wenzhao gave four suggestions on China’s development of intelligent robots against the backdrop that ChatGPT kicks off a new technological revolution. First, China should design independently intelligent robots consistent with national interests and national security policies. Second, the development and utilization of intelligent rewriting robots should be carried out under the country’s political and constitutional framework, and shall not infringe the rights and freedoms of the state, the public and others. Third, the Law System should supervise the development of such intelligent robots in concern with algorithm rules, technical ethics, and things in terms of national security, commercial secrets and personal privacy. Appropriate regulatory and implementation rules shall be formulated and issued in a timely manner. Fourth, China should draw a blueprint and make an overall plan immediately, so as to ride on the trend of the new technological revolution led by ChatGPT and apply the latest outcome to all walks of life, especially in the field of Rule of Law and Education.

Professor Tian Ye talked about ChatGPT’s impact on employment, the most concerning problem of all. While some people worry that the widespread use of ChatGPT could wipe out the needs for some jobs, there are views internationally calling it creative destruction, i.e., creating new and higher-end job opportunities at the expense of repetitive and mechanic jobs. “The theory of creative destruction has proven correct since people started to worry about decreasing job opportunities caused by technological advances long ago. At the age of digital intelligence, ChatGPT is playing the main role in the new version of the story. ” Professor Tian also warned that the real impact of ChatGPT was to be examined.

Professor Liu Shuang cautioned against risks of ChatGPT despite its extraordinary performance after the debut. As part of a fresh wave of so-called AI Generated Content(AIGC), ChatGPT has become the fastest growing consumer app in history with 100 million active consumers in January. It bolstered OpenAI’s valuation up to $29 billion according to a research report released by UBS. Nevertheless, ChatGPT will bring potential ethical questions and problems in intellectual property, false information distribution, and infringement of citizens’ privacy.

It’s Prof. Liu’s concern that if ChatGTP, as a neutral technical act, is maliciously used as a tool of network crimes, can its developers, designers and users use technology neutrality as a defense to shirk responsibilities? She also pointed out the lagging application of big data, new technology and new technologies in Law in the era of Industry 4.0. “It is still unknown whether ChatGPT can be applied to smart justice and digital rule of law or whether it is able to act as a sophisticated judge and strike a balance between law and morality.” Professor Liu called on legal practitioners and peer professionals to take an unbiased stance and embrace conveniences brought by the new technological revolution with rationality and prudence.

Associate Professor Li Chunhui drew audiences’ attention on what new issues ChatGPT may cause in addition to above mentioned problems. “ChatGPT is smarter than the older generation of AI that has already plagued legal scholars a lot. Are the new problems it causes the results of a quantitative change in AI field or a qualitative change in legal research? It depends on the realistic problems that arise from new applications ChatGPT generates.” In this regard, Li proposed two research directions: (1) The legal community should cooperate with the scientific and ethical communities and study how to refine and implement the ethical norms of science and technology and artificial intelligence, and then enact them into laws; (2) Consider the possibility of AI products’ liability. If AI has fully developed and earned a significant degree of trust from most people, should it shoulder the corresponding responsibility? Given its nature as a tool, should its developers or those who provide products or services with it assume certain responsibilities or regulatory obligations?

Associate Professor Wang Ran felt assured that ChatGPT cannot directly replace lawyers or judges, but it can assist them in some repetitive and tedious legal tasks. Zhang Bowen, an expert at THUNISOFT (a company providing legal intelligence services), conducted a preliminary test on ChatGPT in the fields of legal retrieval, contract review, sentencing recommendations, compliance obligation identification, legal document generation, legal element extraction, legal advice and so on. He found that ChatGPT was good at generic tasks and content generation, but poor in matching and recognizing articles of law.

Wang Ran proposed that further thought should be given to the application of AI technology in the legal field. There are two faint ideas: for one thing, extract technical standards and match them with corresponding legal business standards, so as to make clear the tasks and roles of “human” and “machine”; for another, build a relational model between the subject matter of litigation and man-machine service. The smaller the subject matter (not only refers to the amount of money) of litigation is, the easier it is to use AI, but legal actions with large subject matters still need assistance of experienced professionals. Therefore, legal professionals should master the basic data technology or its application skills, and make great efforts to improve irreplaceable legal capability.

Associate Professor Tian Yuan stressed that ChatGPT was like a double-edged sword. While bringing huge technological dividends, it also has risks and challenges such as infringement of intellectual property rights, dissemination of false information, and manipulation of public opinion. To rise to the challenges, we should call up the attention of all involving parites including developers, sellers and users, to pay attention to the risks of ChatGPT and implement all-round prevention and control in the whole process of research and development, promotion, application and other multiple scenarios.

“In terms of prevention and control measures, we should not only rely on good law, the rule of which plays a fundamental role in safeguarding both the national system and the governance system, and ensuring social expectations and future development in the long run, but also enrich our governance tool kit with scientific and technological ethics and social morality discipline,” said Tian Yuan. He warned that relevant measures should be taken prudently and precisely so as not to hurt the development momentum of ChatGPT as an emerging thing and guide it to better serve the society and the people.

Associate Professor Wang Leifan shared three viewpoints.

First of all, nations should be cautious about legislating on such emerging disruptive technologies. On the one hand, it takes a certain amount of time and space to feel the social impact of this technology. Lawmakers should not regulate it based on their own imagination, but on its real social influence. On the other hand, science and technology legislation may affect nations’ international competitiveness. If a country regulates such technologies too early and too strictly, it may cause the outflow of talents and enterprises to countries with less regulations and comparatively a more favourable environment. Then damage will be done to the nation’s S & T competitiveness and industrial and economic development.

Secondly, it is advisable to use soft laws like making relevant ethical rules, guidances and code of conduct to steer the development and implementation of technologies in a positive way.

Thirdly, in the case of ChatGPT application, universities should take into consideration how to identify papers written by ChatGPT as well as how to treat those papers.

The seminar concluded with a presentation by Pro. Sun Youhai, Dean of Law School. He pointed out that the emergence of ChatGPT has raised the upper limit of human society’s natural language processing capacity. It can be an efficient tool to solve problems, create fairly good literary works and even write codes. But at the same time, it may be abused to harm the society by circumventing security mechanisms. For example, it may provide breeding ground for ethical and moral behaviors that violate public orders and good customs, infringements of intellectual property or political acts that endanger public administration. From the perspective of educational and legal communities, with the continuous improvement of ChatGPT’s language learning capability, there will be more concerns about its misuse.

“I hope that teachers and students at our Law School have the courage to face challenges and carry out in-depth research in this area. We should know the new technology and make use of it to deal with practical problems. It’s our duty and honor to offer suggestions for the development and security of our nation in the new era.

By Cheng Xiaotong, Wang Lei

Editor: Eva Yin