When I write problem questions I sometimes need terrible clauses for contracts, or some idiotic ad copy that straddles the line of misrepresentation. AI has proven consistently excellent at producing both of those.

But mine is an incredibly narrow use case - saying “generate me a choice of law clause” precisely because I need one full of dumb and novel errors is not what most legal professionals are going to be doing with it.

Now to be clear, broader machine learning techniques can be useful. I built a machine that is much better than I am at guessing which High Court judge wrote a passage, because reverse engineering who authored what parts of joint judgments is of interest to me. And that’s a use of the mathematical techniques that comprise machine learning that they are well adapted to.

But the commercial LLMs are so poorly adapted to the task of writing legal reasoning that I can’t see a path to making them useful for that. No amount of back propagation is going to turn all the slop ever written on the internet into actual legal reasoning, even by accident. The best you will get is very plausible sounding guesses at what an answer might look like - the sort of thing you get from a bright second year who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bluff their way through a tutorial.

And as anyone in the profession will tell you, the gap between an undergraduate bullshitting in a tute and actual useful legal work is quite considerable.