Open AccessWill Machines Replace Us? Machine-Authored Texts and the Future of Scholarship
Author(s) -
Benjamin Alarie,
Arthur J. Cockfield,
Gpt
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
law, technology and humans
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2652-4074
DOI - 10.5204/lthj.2089
Subject(s) - scholarship , task (project management) , imperfect , state (computer science) , artificial intelligence , computer science , law , political science , management , economics , philosophy , linguistics , algorithm
We present here the first machine-generated law review article. Our self-interest motivates us to believe that knowledge workers who write complex articles drawing upon years of research and effort are safe from AI developments. However, how reasonable is it to persist in this belief given recent advances in AI research? With that topic in mind, we caused GPT-3, a state-of-the-art AI, to generate a paper that explains “why humans will always be better lawyers, drivers, CEOs, presidents, and law professors than artificial intelligence and robots can ever hope to be.” The resulting paper, with no edits apart from giving it a title and bolding the headings generated by GPT-3, is reproduced below. It is imperfect in a humorous way. Ironically, it is publishable “as-is” only because it is machine-generated. Nevertheless, the resulting paper is good enough to give us some pause for thought. Although GPT-3 is not up to the task of replacing law review authors currently, we are far less confident that GPT-5 or GPT-100 might not be up to the task in future.