ChatGPT – The Positives, Negatives & Legal Risks

ChatGPT is a sophisticated artificial intelligence technology (A.I) developed by OpenAI, which is designed to generate human-like responses to natural language queries. While this technology has numerous benefits, it also presents legal risks that companies should be aware of to protect themselves from potential legal liabilities.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses natural language processing and deep learning algorithms to generate responses that closely resemble those we would expect another human to make. The system is trained on a vast amounts of text data, which includes books, articles, and websites, and can generate responses to a wide range of queries.

Positives of ChatGPT

There are numerous benefits associated with the use of ChatGPT, including:

1. Improved Customer Service: ChatGPT can be used to provide quick and efficient customer support, with 24/7 availability and the ability to handle multiple queries simultaneously.

2. Increased Efficiency: ChatGPT can reduce the workload of human customer service representatives, allowing them to focus on more complex queries.

3. Language Translation: ChatGPT can be used to translate between different languages, making it easier for businesses to communicate with customers around the world.

4. Content Creation: ChatGPT can generate high-quality content, including articles, blog posts, and social media posts, saving businesses time and resources.

Negatives of ChatGPT

Unfortunately,  there are also drawbacks to consider, such as:

1. Lack of Emotional Intelligence: ChatGPT lacks emotional intelligence and may struggle to empathize with customers or understand their emotional state.

2. Biased Responses: ChatGPT is trained on large datasets, which may contain biased or discriminatory language. If left unchecked, ChatGPT may generate biased or discriminatory responses.

3. Security Risks: ChatGPT may be vulnerable to security risks, such as data breaches or hacking attempts. These risks can be mitigated with appropriate security measures.

Legal Risks of ChatGPT

Those using ChatGPT (and likely anything similar) should be aware of the potential legal risks associated with its use, such as:

1. Out of Date & Wrong Information: currently the information is not up to date, so you could be getting a response that is no longer legally correct and following that advice could result in illegal activities with high financial penalties.

2. The Wrong Question: Without having a lawyer ask the right questions, you could find you accidently ask the wrong or an incomplete question, that means you get the wrong advice.

3. Privacy Concerns: ChatGPT may collect personal data from users, which raises privacy concerns. Companies using ChatGPT must comply with relevant privacy laws, which are varied across the world.

4. Intellectual Property: ChatGPT may generate content that infringes on the intellectual property rights of others. Companies using ChatGPT must ensure that the system is not used to create infringing content. Furthermore, this is still a new and developing area and who owns the intellectual property in what is created may itself something to be debated and if you are using this to create work you then need to assign to others, you may not have the rights to do that and could even be breaching your contract terms as a result of that.

5. Liability: ChatGPT's responses may result in legal liability. For example, if ChatGPT provides inaccurate or misleading advice, the party who then uses them may be liable for any resulting harm.

Reducing Legal Risks

People can reduce various of the above legal risks by taking the following steps:

1. Lawyers: Get expert legal advice from a lawyer first before releasing or relying upon it. You can still use ChatGPT, or similar, to make your life easier and get extra information or do some of the work required, but before you rely upon it or release it, get an expert experienced lawyer to do a check of both the work but also your particular situation.

2. Implement Appropriate Privacy Policies: Implement appropriate privacy policies that clearly state how user data is collected, used, and protected.

3. Conduct Regular Audits: Regularly audit the data used to train ChatGPT to ensure that it does not contain biased or discriminatory language.

4. Monitor ChatGPT Responses: Closely monitor ChatGPT's responses to ensure that they are accurate, appropriate, and do not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others.

5. Implement Security Measures: Implement appropriate security measures to protect ChatGPT from data breaches or hacking attempts.

ChatGPT is a powerful AI technology that has the potential to provide numerous benefits to businesses. However, businesses should be aware of the potential legal risks associated with its use and take appropriate steps to reduce these risks. The technology is here and it will only continue to grow, so take advantage of it, but be safe and savvy, be aware of and take preventive steps so you get the benefits and not the pain.

For more information on the legalities of ChatGPT, get in touch.

Please note that this is a general and brief update, it does not purport to be comprehensive legal advice of all information and/or relevant to your circumstances. Consequently, specific legal advice for each of your circumstances should be obtained first before taking or not taking any action with respect to this area.