Exploring GenAI with VAILL: Day 1 👣

A 10-day journey into human-centered GenAI for legal professionals

👣 Day 1: First Steps

Hey there! Welcome to your 10-day journey into the world of generative AI, brought to you by the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL). We're excited to explore this landscape with you through a human-centered lens that puts curiosity and experimentation first.

At VAILL, we believe the future of legal practice isn't just about adopting new tools—it's about intentionally designing how humans and AI collaborate to make legal work more meaningful and impactful. Through our research and hands-on work with law students and legal professionals, we've discovered the key to success with AI isn't technical expertise—it's curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to experiment.

And it starts with YOU, and the steps you can take right now to learn about GenAI and how it can augment your work.

Ready to start exploring? Let's dive in!

Before you get started: If you haven’t already, take a look at the Day Zero post on how to set yourself up for success in this exploration. And consider doing the work with friends—we offer tips on creating a community of practice in this post.

Today's Focus: Let's demystify GenAI tools and have our first meaningful interaction with one, focusing on how it can complement your legal expertise.

🎯 Learning Objectives

• Break down common myths about AI in legal practice

• Set up your first GenAI assistant account

• Experience firsthand how AI can support legal thinking and workflow

🔑 Key Concepts

Think of GenAI as a curious new co-worker¹ who's eager to help but needs your expertise to make sense of it all. These tools aren't here to replace legal and other professional thinking—they're here to amplify your capabilities and free up mental space for the complex problem-solving that makes legal work worthwhile.

In our work at VAILL, we've found that the most successful AI interactions happen when legal professionals approach these tools with a spirit of experimentation. It's like learning a new language: you start with simple phrases, learn from the responses, and gradually develop more sophisticated ways of communicating.

The magic happens in what’s called the "prompt"—your way of communicating with AI. It’s literally what you type (or speak) into the chat interface to get useful outputs (content of various kinds) from the GenAI tool. Don't worry, we'll help you master this new language over the next 10 days!

💫 A Note About GenAI Tools

Today's leading GenAI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) all offer robust free versions perfect for learning and experimenting. We'll start with ChatGPT's free version for our exercises, but feel free to explore others!

Curious about paid versions? For about $20/month (cancel anytime), premium features typically include:

• Access to more recent knowledge and capabilities

• Faster response times and priority access

• More advanced analysis tools

• Greater file upload and processing features

• Integration with other software

Our philosophy at VAILL? Start with free versions to explore and experiment. Consider upgrading once you've identified specific features that would enhance your workflow.

💡 Pro Tips

• Approach with curiosity rather than skepticism

• Start with low-stakes experiments

• Keep a "field notebook" of interesting discoveries

✍️ Today's Exercise

Time for your first experiment! Let's start with ChatGPT²:

1. Visit chat.openai.com and create your account

2. Try this exploratory prompt: "Hi! I work in the legal field as [describe your role or job] and I'm curious about generative AI. Could you suggest three interesting ways you might help with brainstorming, analyzing documents, or drafting communications? Please focus on tasks that don't involve confidential information."

3. In this interaction and at all times when using tools like ChatGPT, remember that working with GenAI “is a dialogue, not an order.” Treat each interaction as a conversation—you will get the most out of the conversation if you engage as if you’re talking with a coworker.

4. Follow your curiosity! Spend 20-30 minutes asking follow-up questions about whatever interests you most in the responses.

⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Overthinking your first interactions

• Expecting perfection (remember, we're experimenting!)

• Forgetting that AI needs your professional expertise and guidance to be truly useful³

⚡️ Lightning Round (Optional)

Try the same conversation with two different GenAI tools (like ChatGPT and Claude). What differences do you notice in their "personalities" and approaches? It's like having different research assistants with different styles! Keep experimenting and comparing to decide which tool works best for your purposes.

🔄 Quick Recap

• AI tools are partners in thinking, not replacements

• Experimentation leads to discovery

• Start simple and let curiosity guide you

• Your professional expertise is what makes AI tools valuable: think of the tool as a new co-worker who needs your guidance

📔 Reflect!

Research shows that taking just a few minutes to reflect on new learning experiences can increase future performance more than additional practice.⁴ Before you wrap up today's AI exploration, take a few minutes to write down:

• Reflecting on your initial assumptions about AI tools compared to your actual experience today, what shifted in your thinking?

• What surprised you about today's AI interactions?

• What questions arose that you'd like to explore further?

These brief notes will become invaluable as you build your AI expertise over the next 10 days.

📚 Additional Resources

• Article: Generative AI Exists Because of the Transformer (Financial Times) - The single best visual explainer of how generative AI works

• Video: Introduction to Generative AI (Google) - A look into what GenAI is, how it works, and how it differs from other forms of AI (22:07)

• Interactive: Generative AI for Legal Professionals (Coursera) - Take a deeper dive into generative AI and prompting with VAILL’s founding co-director Mark Williams

👉 Coming Tomorrow

Get ready to level up your AI communications! Tomorrow we'll explore the art of crafting prompts that bring out the best in your GenAI coworker.

Questions? Discoveries? We'd love to hear about your experiments! Share them with us at vaill@vanderbilt.edu.

1. “As [GenAI] is a coworker, you want to work with it, not just give it orders, and you also want to learn out [sic] what it is good or bad at. Start by using it in areas of your expertise, where you are able to quickly figure out the shape of the jagged frontier of its ability.” - Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing

2. We recommend starting with ChatGPT because it currently offers access to the most powerful large language model and most features with the free version. Go here to compare features of free versus paid accounts. While we think the $20+tax/month is worth the investment, you get a lot of bang for the buck by experimenting first with the free version.

3. “Because you are expert, you will be able to quickly assess where the AI is wrong or right. You do need to be prepared for it to give you plausible but wrong answers, but don’t let the risk of these hallucinations scare you off initially. Though hallucinations may be inevitable, you will learn where they are a big deal, and where they are not, over time. You can reduce the rate of hallucinations somewhat by giving the AI the ability to be wrong, for example, writing: if you’re unsure or [lack] necessary information, say ‘I don’t have enough information to answer this’ can make a big difference.” - Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing

4. Reflection can be more valuable than additional practice for improving performance, but most people don't realize this! Across multiple experiments, participants who took time to reflect on their experience outperformed those who spent that time practicing more.
See “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Can Spur Progress Along the Learning Curve” SSRN link