Anthropomorphic Seduction, or Why We Still Need Law Librarians

On a beautiful Friday morning in Seattle a few weeks ago, the annual WestPac Conference kicked off with a keynote by Dr. Jevin West, a professor and associate dean for research in the Information School at the University of Washington. The day was made even better because of what Dr. West had to say: law librarians are needed now more than ever as trusted humans in the loop as there is no attachment to the truth within large-language models. As Dr. West stated, “Guardrails are like a game of wack-a-mole.”

Dr. West, along with Carl Bergstrom, developed a free online course entitled Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?: How to Thrive in a ChatGPT World that covers LLM principles that might seem obvious, but with what Dr. West describes as anthropomorphic seduction, it’s easy to forget: LLMs are not conscious, they can be turned off, and they have no moral sentiments. LLMs do not know or understand truth; one example provided was if you asked Google, “Is there a country in Africa that starts with the letter K?,” the top answer was a page generated by an LLM with incorrect information. We can analogize information in an LLM to the potato famine (monoculture) – if we crawl one single source for truth and that single model collapses, what do we have left?

So, what tasks should we use an LLM to complete? Appropriate uses include rephrasing an awkward sentence; writing a few lines of computer code; recalling a fact on the tip of your tongue; finding the right search term for a question; and locating what a document should look like. However, the caveat is that we must always verify what we discover. Dr. West does not believe AI usage is actually saving time but in fact it’s creating higher expectations of individuals.

Law librarians as humans in the loop of the AI process is more important now more than ever, especially with headlines like these: Minnesota Law Restricting Deepfakes Close to Elections Holds Up in Federal Court for Now and Judge Rebukes Stanford Misinformation Expert for Using ChatGPT to Draft Testimony. We need to stay up to date on LLMs, how they’re used in legal research, and how they impact our patrons. In addition to belonging to LIT-SIS, consider joining the AI Caucus, participating in feedback groups with vendors, and reading about AI outside of the law. You might even decide to take Dr. West’s online class or read his book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.