This article was originally published in the spring edition of the Expert Matter Magazine. 

It’s impossible to ignore Artificial Intelligence (AI) which suddenly exploded into the public conscious a couple of years ago with the launch of ChatGPT. The term AI was actually coined in 1956, and some of the underlying mathematics has been around for centuries. What changed everything was the emergence of transformers, a technology that was developed at Google that has enabled software to interpret complex human language and offer a remarkable facsimile of intelligent dialogue.

AI is infiltrating almost every area of human endeavour, so it is inevitable that it will impact your practice as an expert witness. As both an AI practitioner and an Expert Witness I’m well placed to see the possibilities. This introductory article is divided into two parts: the power and pitfalls of AI tools, and how AI will affect the matters on which we opine.

AI is Everywhere

You do not have to use ChatGPT to use AI, it is increasingly embedded in all the so-called productivity software we use. Autocompletion of sentences, spelling correction and other capabilities have been around for years and we take them largely for granted – until they go wrong. More advanced AI capabilities, such as software offering to rewrite your carefully-crafted prose for you, are only going to become more common. One of the powers of large language models (‘LLMs’) is the ability to write in an incredibly compelling style, but this may accidentally end up changing the meaning of technical terms be they legal, medical or specific to any of the dozens of domains in which we work.

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