Testament Talks: Can ChatGPT Draft Your Legal Will?

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0:37What sorts of things are good to do with it? What sorts of things are not? And so on the podcast today, I want to talk about one that I know is going to be controversial and that is can ChatGPT write a will? So we're going to be talking about if it is a legally binding will, if you do use it. And we're going to talk about how ChatGPT is going to impact the law profession. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So first off, really quick, defining what a will is, I think it's going to be important for the conversation. So pretty much a will is a legal document and outlines how a person's assets should be distributed after their death.

1:14So it also appoints an executor to manage the estate, and it might include other instructions such as burial arrangements and guardianships of children. To be valid, a will must meet certain legal requirements. Now, this is important in the context of what we're about to talk about. In general, the testator, that's the person creating the will, must be of sound mind, right? Like you can't go get a crazy uncle to write a will and leave you everything. so that means that you know they really have to understand the nature of the consequences of their decision and the will must be in writing signed by the testator and witnessed by at least two people who are not beneficiaries of the will right so you can't just you know that it's obviously to protect old their elderly people or people that are less mentally capable from being taken advantage of by random people that you know let's say some guy gets married and his new wife says you know he's going to leave all of his money to her instead of to his children or something like that.

2:12There's got to be witnesses to make sure this thing's legit and the witnesses can be people that are getting something from the will specifically. So now that we got that out of the way, can ChatGPT write a will? So technically, yes, ChatGPT can generate text that looks like a will, complete with specific instructions for distribution, assets, appointing an executor, and so on. However, the bigger question really is just like whether this will created by, you know, an AI language is actually legally binding. The short answer is that it's not 100 % clear. And, you know, what's interesting, this thing is so new, there's a lot of lawsuits happening, there's a lot of legal stuff being litigated right now and figured out and people are trying to come up with, you know, the government's trying to find out ways to regulate a very interesting lawsuit that just came out today against the copyright with the copyright office and an artist, he wrote a book and he had mid-journey the image generator do the graphics for and the copyright office ruled that you cannot copyright images generated by an image generator, generative AI.

3:18So, I mean, in the context of that, that doesn't really affect necessarily this like legal aspect because like you're not trying to copyright your will. We're just trying to see if it's, you know, legally binding. But it is interesting that There are some, you know, there's some legal precedents for people kind of pushing back against AI and what it creates. So there's no laws that explicitly recognize a will as valid. In fact, most laws regarding wills were written a very long time ago. This is not like a new thing, right, that is coming out. So this is pretty settled law, you could say. So they don't really have a lot of new guidance in the area.

3:55There are a few potential issues, though, that could come up with an AI-generated will. For one, it's unclear whether an AI language model can truly understand the nature and consequences of the decisions it's making. So even if the text of the will looks good, there might be underlying assumptions or biases that could render it invalid. And, right, this is why you need lawyers to review every line of a contract and the way everything is phrased. so another issue is just the lack of human um witnesses per se when it's writing um because technically you need witnesses while it's being written although i don't really know if that's you know that some people say that's a problem i don't know if that's much of a problem i remember uh personally uh when i was growing up um going and having my parents went and talked to their lawyer and got a will written up but i think they just kind of told him what they wanted the will to be and he kind of drafted it up and did the rest.

4:50So I don't know if there really needed to be witnesses while it was being drafted so much as maybe there's witnesses, and I could be wrong about this, but witnesses, you know, when it's being signed and declared like a legal document. So finally, there's issues of fraud. If someone were to use an AI language model to create a fraudulent will, it might be difficult to prove that the testator truly intended for the will to be valid. This is true of any type of will, though, so I don't think this is particularly a problem with an AI-generated will, but the lack of a human testator in this case could make it a little bit more challenging to prove intent.

5:27So overall, I think it's possible that an AI-generated will could be considered legally binding in some jurisdictions, but it's also possible that it could be challenged or rejected. But at the same time, and, you know, something like a will is not something that you want to really leave up to possibly having the contents of it being rejected. You know, you want this to be a pretty solid, straightforward thing. And that being said, like, I know there's a lot of apps, there's one called Tomorrow app, there's a lot of different apps that you can go on. And they've just essentially had lawyers draft up legally binding wills.

5:57And you just go and you can pretty much specify how you want your assets to be treated after you die, all that kind of stuff. And they have it all wrapped up in an app. so I'm pretty sure if they can figure out how to do that in an app I'm not sure how they have like who's um you know legally being the witnesses for it and all that kind of stuff I haven't personally done it but I'm pretty sure if they figured out how to do it in an app you could figure out how to make um a chat gpt generated will good I mean all it's really doing is generating the content you're still gonna need real humans real people to um to you know witness it and you are gonna need to sign it and uh obviously I would always say like don't trust chat gpt to just create content, especially when it's about legal stuff, you would, you know, if anything, you'd get this thing to draft something up, you'd send it over to a lawyer, have them review it, and maybe it's going to save the lawyer time and it's going to cost you less money to have a lawyer look over a will you created than if you were getting a lawyer to create one from scratch.

6:52But you also could probably just use a lot of different apps and software that have already been pre-reviewed by lawyers. So depending on what the price difference is on those things, I think you could look at that. So as far as, I mean, the impact of ChatGPT on the law profession in general, there's no way this thing completely kills lawyers. You know, you need these people to review and to make sure that everything looks good. However, I do think a lot of tasks and things lawyers do can be automated. A lot of the stuff they charge a ton of money for can be automated. And I think that, you know, eventually we're going to start seeing, you know, these AI generated tools for the specific law degree.

7:29There's so much content out there that these things can train on, similar to how we're seeing it used in medicine with like PubMed, GPT. And so I think this is going to be a really big area, something that is going to get automated to a large degree. Now, some people have worries about the quality of the content coming out. And, you know, there's ethical considerations, there's a whole bunch of different areas. But at the end of the day, I think that this is going to be an area that does get automated, whether people like it or not. And I do think that as long as you have a real lawyer reviewing the content that is coming out of this, that it's perfectly viable, and it's probably a faster, more effective, and more efficient solution.

8:08So less money necessarily to lawyers, but maybe you need more lawyers, because now everyone's going to be doing, you know, everyone's going to be creating wills and creating more legal documents now because it's cheaper and more affordable, which technically, traditionally, in history, when technology or options become cheaper, all that does is the price going down opens up to a wider customer base. And so I don't think that people are going to spend less money in the law sector as a whole. But maybe the tasks they do will shift slightly and there's going to be more customers spending less money, which overall, you know, increases the global standard of living when you can get more products for cheaper.

8:47So I think this is a good thing long term. I think there's going to be a lot of automation and disrupt for the law profession, but it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds in the future.

9:17led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and e-book.