06/21/2024

AI Guidelines Established by Legal Groups

The NYSBA created the standards to safeguard its members

The New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) has released guidelines to its members on the use of generative AI with a goal of addressing privacy breaches, ethical missteps and "hallucinated" case briefs.

The NYSBA’s report [PDF], published earlier this month, is the product of a months-long process developed by a dedicated Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, one of the first acts taken by president Richard Lewis. “We pick issues [for task forces] because they're the issues that are in our face right now,” he said. "And you can't find anything that is more in-your-face than AI—it's a subject that is on everyone's mind."

The task force is also responding to some recent high-profile embarrassments in the legal profession, including an incident last year where two New York lawyers were sanctioned by a federal judge for using generative-AI tool ChatGPT to create a legal brief that included fake case citations. The report includes a discussion of that particular case and the way AI tools and large language models can “hallucinate” content. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.