A Survey of Lay People's Willingness to Generate Legal Advice using Large Language Models (LLMs)

As of November 2022—following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT—the general public’s awareness of generative AI, and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased. LLMs such as ChatGPT now have the capability to generate text indistinguishable from human authored text, which comes with numerous risks. In this paper, we investigate public perception and willingness to use LLMs as a substitute for legal advice from legal professionals. Our findings show that while few people have used it for this purpose, the willingness to rely on LLMs in the future is growing. Interestingly, this depends on the specific area of law, and while LLMs are perceived to be highly valuable in relation to topics such as tenancy and tax law, they seem to be perceived as less valuable in contexts such as divorce or civil disputes.