A client recently showed me a Waiver she wanted to use for an overnight retreat in Bali that she had asked ChatGPT to create for her.

When she sent it to me, I almost fell off of my chair with how poorly ChatGPT drafted a retreat agreement.

ChatGPT spit out a simple release, like you’d use for a 1 hour yoga class – with just 2 sentences in it about the overnight parts…which is definitely not enough.

As a lawyer, I almost died when I saw it. 😳

Unlike a 1-hour yoga class, overnight retreats have TONS of areas of risk.

🐘 Like taking excursions to see the elephants.

🍤 Like serving delicious Indonesian food with shrimp paste, spices or ingredients someone might be allergic to.

🧘 Like staying at the hotel or being transported by van to the beach for morning yoga. Ahhhh!

She said she asked ChatGPT to create something and that’s what it gave her. She told me “I think it looks okay but I’m not totally sure.”

She had NO idea that she needed language in her retreat document about excursions, allergies, hotel info, grounds for removing someone from the retreat for safety reasons, emergency contact info, medical consent, etc., etc., the list goes on and on.

ChatGPT is great for many things, but not for legal work.

ChatGPT has no idea how to distinguish what language you ACTUALLY need in a legal agreement and language very clearly isn’t enough to protect you.

It thinks that a simple release will protect you when you and your 10 participants are staying at a gorgeous resort for 5 days. It’s shocking.

What’s even more shocking is that my client almost used it with her retreat participants.

She would have had NO coverage if someone got hurt or ill or thrown off of an elephant. That’s scary!

Here are 3 BIG reasons why using AI for your legal needs can actually hurt you:

1. The information you receive is NOT ACCURATE (yet!) so it can harm you by including language that could hurt you and leave out language you really need.

2. AI doesn’t know how to distinguish the LEGAL LANGUAGE you need to actually protect you from GENERIC disclaimer language that leaves gaps. There’s no point in using a generic document with gaps all over the place because you’ll leave yourself limited and wide open to risk. And when you’re taking people to a foreign country doing all kinds of fun excursions with elephants and on the beach, you don’t want your protection to be “limited”.

3. AI doesn’t understand what you do specifically – like as a health coach, functional medicine practitioner, licensed practitioner or spiritual healer – so it doesn’t write you the correct language for your expertise.

Generic legal language from ChatGPT doesn’t cut it.

Using ChatGPT to do preliminary research – like how you use Google – sure.

But for the exact same reason you shouldn’t cut and paste some random legal document from Google (or from a friend, for that matter), it doesn’t give you peace of mind to use something off of Google – or even offer much protection! – because it’s most likely not accurate or complete for your needs.

Please, for the love of all things holy, please do NOT use ChatGPT for legal documents!!!

I just shared an example about the inaccuracy of ChatGPT when it comes to legal stuff, but it’s equally as insufficient when it comes to other topics too like medicine, finance, and more.

AI is still really in its infancy…so please use it as a research tool but don’t take what it says at 100%. Don’t rely on it like it’s an expert yet. It’s very clearly not.

Here’s to using ChatGPT for lots of areas of your business…but not for law!

🎙️ And for other AI legal issues (that you really need to know!), have a listen right here to the Health Biz Growth Show (formerly Mindshare) podcast where I talk with their CEO, Tim Organ, about all things AI.