Like so many people in and around the legal world, Obiter has spent much of the past month talking to people about artificial intelligence (or, for the pedants, LLMs based on natural-language processing and machine learning). Our conclusion? Spoiler alert: it is not going to put all lawyers out of work.

What really impresses, however, is how many experts we now have on the topic. With apologies to those who really do know their stuff, here are Obiter’s tips for becoming an instant AI guru.

1. Show you’re on top of the breakneck speed of progress by specifying absurdly precise dates for historical eras. It’s a bit old hat to consign as ancient history everything that happened before 30 November 2022 (the original release date of ChatGPT), but you could try chipping in to a discussion with ‘of course X or Y was before last Tuesday’ (when OpenAI was forced to suspend sign-ups before they melt its computer farms).

2. When someone boasts about deploying some LLM-type system, ask them ‘how are you handling the prompt engineering?’ That’s current jargon for making sure users pose the right questions to their artificial brains.

New buzzphrases and landmark dates will be along shortly. Watch this space.

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