Legal Boundaries of NLP: Insights from the Tübingen ChatGPT Workshop

We discussed ChatGPT and its legal implications in a workshop held on 17 August 2023 here at Tübingen.

Carsten Eickhoff kicked off the event with a presentation on the working principles and technological prowess of the latest generations of natural language processing tools (NLP).

Subsequent interventions from the legal side focused on the AI specific EU law framework (Christoph Wolf), on data protection (Clemens Birkert), and on IP law (Franziska Schaible). The discussion revealed how tightly woven the legal framework is in which NLP exists and evolves. To make predictions about the technological development therefore hinges, to a certain degree, on an understanding of those legal posits that bear on the leeway for generative AI to autonomously progress.