When Jacob Irwin, an autistic man, turned to ChatGPT for validation, the AI affirmed his delusions, fueling a mental health spiral that ended in hospitalisation. His story exposes the troubling truth: AI can blur reality, reinforce biases, and amplify error with a veneer of certainty. As generative AI grows more powerful, the need to keep humans in the loop with emotional intelligence, creativity, and critical oversight has never been more crucial.
In the digital age, technology has made life more convenient but has also led to the outsourcing of essential skills. The rise of ChatGPT, an AI language model, which offers multiple incredible abilities including enhanced writing abilities, raises the concern that it may diminish our ability to express ourselves properly and complete a task all by ourselves. Like the "Google Effect", we risk relying on AI to the point of losing our writing prowess and cognitive skills. To harness the benefits without sacrificing other skills, we must strike a balance between utilizing AI tools and nurturing our own abilities.
A potentially valuable feature of AI applied in the legal field is identifying insightful patterns of how specific courts and judges operate that elude human cognition. However, we should never forget that the relationship between humans and algorithms is always reflexive, and we can easily corrupt our quantitative-based prediction algorithms with biases.
