Technology
AI takes on starring role in 4 articles published by law journal
The Texas A&M Journal of Property Law has published a collection of four articles on the loss of biodiversity that were drafted with the help of artificial intelligence. (Image from Shutterstock)
The Texas A&M Journal of Property Law has published a collection of four articles on the loss of biodiversity that were drafted with the help of artificial intelligence.
Above the Law covered the project and the footnote that ran with each article. It states that portions of the article “were drafted and/or revised” with the help of ChatGPT and Anthropic’s LLM Claude. All content was reviewed and verified by a research team, the footnote said.
The volume’s editor-in-chief, Spencer Nayar, and managing editor, Michael Cooper, wrote a foreword to share what they learned in the process and to propose a standard set of signals to communicate the role of AI in scholarly work.
Their five-level standard ranges from Level 1, in which there is no use of AI, to Level 5, in which AI produces the research and the draft article, subject to minor edits by the author. A footnote adopting this standard might read: “The author used artificial intelligence in the researching and investigation of this topic. [AI Assistance Level 2].”
Editors reviewing prose constructed by AI have to go beyond verifying footnote style and sources to “identify the specific language within the source that supports the proposition being made,” Nayar and Cooper said. It is also important to check for plagiarism.
Nayar and Cooper stated that reliability problems with AI are temporary because its models are “ever improving.” “As other scholars have already noted,” they wrote, “AI is the worst it will ever be right now.”
AI will enable scholars to spend less time with “grunt work” to focus on “truly moving the ball forward by connecting disparate areas of law, arguing for changes and utilizing the resources AI collates,” they wrote.
The authors of the four law review articles are Andrew W. Torrance, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, and Bill Tomlinson, an informatics professor at the University of California at Irvine. They previously wrote an article published in the SMU Law Review Forum on best practices for writing with AI. A footnote to that article explained the contribution of AI.
Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.
