The ChatGPT bot passes the law school exam

ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence Writing Grading

ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence Writing Grading 08:02

A chatbot powered by vast amounts of data from the internet has passed exams at a US law school after writing essays on subjects ranging from constitutional law to taxes to torts.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a US company that received a massive cash injection from Microsoft this week — uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate streams of text from simple prompts.

The results have been so good that educators have warned it could lead to widespread cheating and even spell the end of traditional classroom teaching methods.

Jonathan Choi, a professor at Minnesota University Law School, gave ChatGPT the same test that students had to take, consisting of 95 multiple-choice questions and 12 essay questions.

A ChatGPT prompt appears on a device. Peter Morgan/AP

In a white paper titled “ChatGPT goes to Law School” published Monday, he and his co-authors reported that the bot received an overall C+ rating.

While this was good enough for a pass, the bot was at the bottom of the class in most subjects and “bombed” on multiple-choice math-related questions.

“When writing essays, ChatGPT demonstrated a strong understanding of basic legal rules and had a solid organization and composition throughout,” the authors wrote.

But the bot “often had trouble spotting problems when faced with an open-ended prompt, a core skill in law school exams.”

Officials in New York and other jurisdictions have banned the use of ChatGPT in schools, but Choi suggested it could be a valuable teaching aid.

“Overall, ChatGPT wasn’t a great law student to act alone,” he wrote on Twitter.

“But we anticipate that working with human language models like ChatGPT would be very useful for law students taking exams and practicing lawyers.”

And as he downplayed the possibility of cheating, he wrote in response to another Twitter user that two out of three markers spotted the paper written with the bot.

“(They) had a guess and their guess was right because ChatGPT had perfect grammar and was a bit repetitive,” Choi wrote.

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