Chatbot was a “lawyer” and helped a woman win a lawsuit. “I told ChatGPT to pretend to be a Harvard Law professor and to dismantle my arguments to perfection.”
Bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into the courtroom as a “lawyer” is a risky move, but it happened — and worked — to the delight of Lynn White of Long Beach, California, USA.
The woman was able to reverse an eviction order and avoid thousands of dollars in penalties and rent arrears, after asking her ChatGPT and the platform Perplexity to imitate a defense lawyer, rather than hiring one in the flesh.
In financial difficulties and late in paying her rent, the subject lost her initial trial before a jury and received an eviction notice. But he wanted to appeal and present himself in person with ChatGPT “by his side”. He would be responsible for building his legal arguments.
“I cannot emphasize enough the usefulness of AI in my case,” the accused told . “I would never, ever, ever, ever have been able to beat this feature without AI.”
The woman was able to overturn the eviction order and avoid approximately $55,000 in penalties and more than $18,000 in back rent.
White explained what exactly he did: “he told the “I told ChatGPT to pretend I was a Harvard Law professor and to dismantle my arguments“.
The results were so convincing that they earned praise from the opposition.
Despite this success, experts warn that AI results vary significantly from case to case. Perhaps White was luckier, but law is one of the areas at stake with the evolution of AI, particularly in tasks such as reviewing contracts, drafting and analyzing case law, functions that can increasingly be performed by sophisticated algorithms, capable of processing large volumes of information accurately and quickly.
