Articles

Edward S. Cheng quoted in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly on limitations of AI in legal work

Edward S. Cheng, partner in the firm’s Litigation Department, was quoted in an article from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly on October 13. The article, titled “With AI, hallucination crackdown just one thing for lawyers to worry about,”  examines the pitfalls of AI, and the imperfections that make it unsuitable for legal work.

From the article:

A fundamental pitfall with “generic” AI programs like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot that attorneys seem to have fallen prey to is that, if need be, the programs will pull “cases” (in some instances, nonexistent ones) and make up analysis that does not withstand scrutiny “because their primary function is to make the user happy, not accuracy,” said Boston attorney Edward S. Cheng.

While the “i” in AI may stand for “intelligence,” what the chatbots are doing is not “thinking” in the human sense and are particularly ill-suited to legal work, according to Cheng.

“What it looks for, essentially, are patterns,” Cheng said. “It will see ‘the sun,’ and then it will see next to the word ‘sun’ ‘sunlight,’ and it’ll see the word ‘warm.’ The program has no conceptual idea of what warmth is or sunlight is, but it knows that statistically speaking, a proper sentence that we understand, if you see the word ‘sun,’ will include ‘warmth’ or ‘light’ in it somewhere, and by doing that it eventually creates sentences that make sense to us.”

Continue reading in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (subscriber-only content).