Getting Along with GPT: The Psychology, Character, and Ethics of Your Newest Professional Colleague; ABA Journal, May 9, 2025

 ABA Journal; Getting Along with GPT: The Psychology, Character, and Ethics of Your Newest Professional Colleague

"The Limits of GenAI’s Simulated Humanity

• Creative thinking. An LLM mirrors humanity’s collective intelligence, shaped by everything it has read. It excels at brainstorming and summarizing legal principles but lacks independent thought, opinions, or strategic foresight—all essential to legal practice. Therefore, if a model’s summary of your legal argument feels stale, illogical, or disconnected from human values, it may be because the model has no democratized data to pattern itself on. The good news? You may be on to something original—and truly meaningful!
• True comprehension. An LLM does not know the law; it merely predicts legal-sounding text based on past examples and mathematical probabilities.
• Judgment and ethics. An LLM does not possess a moral compass or the ability to make judgments in complex legal contexts. It handles facts, not subjective opinions.  
• Long-term consistency. Due to its context window limitations, an LLM may contradict itself if key details fall outside its processing scope. It lacks persistent memory storage.
• Limited context recognition. An LLM has limited ability to understand context beyond provided information and is limited by training data scope.
• Trustfulness. Attorneys have a professional duty to protect client confidences, but privacy and PII (personally identifiable information) are evolving concepts within AI. Unlike humans, models can infer private information without PII, through abstract patterns in data. To safeguard client information, carefully review (or summarize with AI) your LLM’s terms of use."