Popular AI chatbots from
Large language models hallucinate at least 75% of the time when answering questions about a court’s core ruling, the researchers found. They tested more than 200,000 legal questions on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5, Google’s PaLM 2, and Meta’s Llama 2—all general-purpose models not built for specific legal use.
Generative artificial intelligence has raised hopes that the powerful technology can help provide legal services to people who can’t afford a lawyer. According to the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation, low-income people in the US received inadequate or no help for 92% of civil legal issues they face.
But AI’s inaccuracies could put a damper on those hopes, warned Stanford researchers, who published a preprint study at the start of the year and announced their findings in a blog Jan. 11.
“The big finding here is that the hallucination rates are not isolated, they’re pretty pervasive,” said Daniel Ho, a law professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the school’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, who co-authored the research paper.
‘Proceed With Much More Caution’
Generative AI tools specifically trained for legal use may perform better, but building those tools on general-purpose models could still lead to accuracy problems, Ho said.
“We should n