Scheherazade, ChatGPT, and Me: Storytelling and AI

Humans developed language to tell stories. Gesturing, demonstration, and vocalization worked for communicating instructions or basic information. But establishing and maintaining community required story, and story required language. Our desire to tell better stories and share them more widely has led to the creation of art forms from simple guitar ballads to epic motion pictures and intricate first-person video games. So it’s no wonder that, in the era of generative artificial intelligence, storytellers would be among the first to put AI to work. Storytellers have been using AI for years already to develop stories, which means that AI has itself become an accomplished storyteller. However, the stories that generative AI tells are not usually constrained by a factual record and legal precedent the way that legal stories are. It’s no wonder then that generative AI is not yet ubiquitous as a storytelling tool for lawyers. But it will be. In this presentation, I will model a process for training ChatGPT-4 on a factual record and relevant law. I will then model “coaching” ChatGPT-4 to generate a sequence of drafts, each one a better, more compelling draft of a trial or appellate Statement of Facts. Time permitting, I will also demonstrate how to use ChatGPT-4 tendency to “hallucinate” to draft assignments, including curated hypothetical facts, in seconds.