One of the main rationales for AI adoption, besides the lazy “AI is inevitable” slop that gets bandied about, is that it helps speed up the process of thinking. Want a little help organizing your ideas? Throw whatever shards of an argument you have in the black box and the LLM will structure it for you. Need to review your complaint for redundancies? Why not have the proprietary software of the day do that for you? Well, you run the risk of sliding from having an LLM help you process your thoughts to outsourcing the task of thinking itself. And while it might be fun for the average lawyer to go on Heidegerrian tangents concerning What Is Thinking?, law schools have to deal with the question pragmatically. There are all sorts of pressures for schools to encourage students to adopt AI into their workflows and study habits, Supreme Court justices included, but UC Berkeley’s faculty decided that their students will be better off heavily reducing their AI usage for pedagogy’s sake:
You can read the full policy here.
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What a great way to discover that there are some Luddites left in the profession. I kid — the policy does carve out situations where professors can explicitly assign students to use AI on some assignments. But it is important for institutions of higher learning to give budding lawyers the skill set needed to think like lawyers before they’re abandoned to merely prompting like lawyers. And while I imagine it would be difficult to prevent students from using AI to brainstorm paper topics, summarize legal rules, and create exam outlines, these are are foundational aspects to processing classroom information and preparing for exams that students should be doing (and at the very least, be capable of doing) anyway.
When it comes to learning and thinking, the consequences of our engagement with technology can be hard to notice, but that doesn’t prevent it from being formative. Quite literally, we’re still figuring out the neuroscience of recording data via handwriting compared to typing. As students learn the law, it is important for faculty to consider the pedagogical consequences of their AI policies. Time will tell if UC Berkeley made the right decision. I’d ask ChatGPT if they did the right thing or not, but I wouldn’t want to violate any policies.
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.