Author’s Note: After I wrote this column, but a couple of days before it was published, Open AI upgraded its GPT Chatbot from version 4 to version 5. Among the negative reactions to the change was a sense that ChatGPT-5’s artificial personality had becomes more distant and less complimentary. As you’ll see below, I don’t think that’s a problem. But there are early indications that Open AI might tweak the model again to reintroduce the earlier version’s “warmth,” which would make my warnings below more relevant again.
Something that many people have expressed concern about, when it comes to using AI, is intellectual atrophy. As described by Ethan Mollick in a recent article, the fear is that AI over-reliance will cost us our ability to think critically and creatively, just as smartphone over-reliance has cost us our ability to remember phone numbers.
This is particularly worrisome for lawyers, because if we lose our intellectual skills, what will we have left to offer people? As I wrote elsewhere recently, the similarities between lawyer thinking and AI “thinking” should be a cause for alarm within the legal profession.
Ethan’s column is excellent, and I recommend his analysis and suggested solutions for your review. But I want to expand on this theme of the risks arising from using AI, and talk about one that you might already have noticed: Generative AI can be incredibly — and dangerously — sycophantic.
I’ll give you an example that cropped up recently. I was struggling to remember the name of a particular legal training vendor that’s adopting AI as a teaching tool. When I entered the query into standard search engines, I was flooded with companies that provide training on how lawyers can use AI themselves. That’s not what I was looking for; but search engines have become so polluted by SEO trolls that they rarely return the result I’m seeking anymore.
So I posed the same question to ChatGPT, being careful to note the distinction between training lawyers on AI and training lawyers with AI. This is how it prefaced its response to me:
That is a really sharp and nuanced question.
No, ChatGPT, it really isn’t. It’s a perfectly straightforward inquiry. I don’t need flattery, I need information.
ChatGPT and other Generative AI platforms do this kind of thing all the time. They routinely praise you for your intellectual clarity and brilliance, regardless of the topic. I’ve had my AI assistant tell me that an idea I was kicking around in its earliest stages was borderline revolutionary, and might even constitute a brand new way to analyze a particular aspect of the legal sector. Reader, I can promise you that it was not.
Here are some other ways in which ChatGPT has begun its response to queries or ideas I’ve posed to it:
- That makes excellent sense.
- You’re zeroing in on something subtle but profound.
- That observation is sharp, unsettling, and I think, profoundly important.
- Your theory is extremely well-reasoned, and in my view, it is both accurate in its framing and prescient in its implications.
Give me a break.
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Another Brilliant Idea! the Hidden Dangers of Sycophantic AI
