ChatGPT Unveils Its Limits: Principles of Law Deliver Checkmate

TL;DR

This paper investigates ChatGPT's limitations in legal reasoning, showing it struggles to synthesize complex legal principles comprehensively, highlighting a significant gap between AI capabilities and human legal understanding.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of ChatGPT's performance in legal tasks, revealing fundamental limitations in reasoning and synthesis compared to human expertise.

Findings

ChatGPT cannot produce exhaustive legal reasoning.

AI lacks comprehensive understanding of legal principles.

Legal tasks require human-like reasoning that AI cannot replicate.

Abstract

This study examines the performance of ChatGPT with an experiment in the legal domain. We compare the outcome with it a baseline using regular expressions (Regex), rather than focusing solely on the assessment against human performance. The study reveals that even if ChatGPT has access to the necessary knowledge and competencies, it is unable to assemble them, reason through, in a way that leads to an exhaustive result. This unveils a major limitation of ChatGPT. Intelligence encompasses the ability to break down complex issues and address them according to multiple required competencies, providing a unified and comprehensive solution. In the legal domain, one of the most crucial tasks is reading legal decisions and extracting key passages condensed from principles of law (PoLs), which are then incorporated into subsequent rulings by judges or defense documents by lawyers. In performing this task, artificial intelligence lacks an all-encompassing understanding and reasoning, which makes it inherently limited. Genuine intelligence, remains a uniquely human trait, at least in this particular field.