AI, ML, LLM, DL. OMG, this isn’t the first time lawyers have had to learn new terms and abbreviations to keep up with legal technology. Tip: Context matters.
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Abbreviations from Other Contexts
Did you ever want to search for something on the American Bar Association website, so you Googled “ABA”? Yikes! Depending on what the browser remembers about your search history, you could end up with:
- American Bankers Association
- American Basketball Association
- American Booksellers Association
- Applied Behavior Analysis
- Architectural Barriers Act
- The American Board of Anesthesiology
One abbreviation can refer to a multitude of things. Context matters.
We’re All Techies Now
Our inboxes are bulging with news about how AI, Artificial Intelligence, is changing the legal landscape. Even the staff at AI, Amnesty International, probably uses it.
Other names for Artificial Intelligence include ML, machine learning (not measured by the ML-milliliter). And there’s DL, Deep Learning, which is different from Data Link or even Disability Leave, all of which share the abbreviation. AI, ML and DL all refer to simple automation, but now, whether or not you hold an LLM (Master of Laws), when you refer to LLM, you are most likely to be talking about the big AI forward leap, Large Language Model.
LLM in this context refers to automation that can digest huge amounts of text and other data and spit it out in various formats on command. What could go wrong?
LLM learns by gobbling up available intelligence, pretty much everything on the internet, without regard, some claim, to whether that intellectual property is protected from unauthorized use. Authors have filed several lawsuits seeking compensation. Celebrities have sued for unauthorized reproduction of their voices. At least one scholar has warned that AI’s ability to make decisions is downright scary.
AI is so eager to please, it produces false information to satisfy the user’s question. Known as hallucinations, credible-sounding fake answers have induced a number of lawyers to present the AI response as actual legal work.
Even lawyers in large, prestigious firms have submitted AI-created, phony legal text to a court, triggering sanctions. The U.S. Senate learned that federal judges have issued erroneous rulings based on AI hallucinations. The judges blamed their failure to check their own rulings on their interns. Classy. These SNAFUs are FUBAR!
Aww, Crud!
That subheading is an exclamation, not a reference to the four basic functions of a persistent storage system: Create, Read, Update, Delete.
This isn’t the first time lawyers have had to learn new terms to keep up with technology. It won’t be the last. Can you remember when you first figured out what an ISP, Internet Service Provider, was? It was something to do with tech, but you were pretty sure it wasn’t Interface Segregation Principle, In-System Programming, or Image Signal Processor, all of which are abbreviated ISP.
Instead of resisting the march of progress, look up every term you don’t know. When you input your search, the top result will probably be a response formulated by AI.
Get to the Point!
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