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Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Collin Peters

Abstract

Generative AI tools have been increasingly used by corporations and individuals to create documents quickly and cheaply based on short human inputs. The coming of widely accessible and cheap-to-use generative AI tools introduces the possibility of firms or lay testators using AI to generate wills. However, the risks of using AI to generate wills are largely unexplored and have not received much regulatory attention nor discussion in the literature. As a result, the question of how to manage the risks of AI-generated wills in a way that ensures their safe, accessible, and productive use has largely gone unaddressed. This article seeks to explore the potential risks of AI wills to estate law and outline an ideal regulation path to manage these hazards while encouraging productive and safe deployment of AI in the field. To reach its conclusions, this Article proceeds in four parts. Part A surveys the existing law touching the use of AI in estate law. Part B investigates the technological and economic limitations of AI and how these stand to affect the field of estate law. Part C surveys what can be learned from implementations of generative AI in other industries. Finally, Part D synthesizes this information into a list of concrete regulatory suggestions. This Article finds that generative AI has limitations which imply several new and potentially significant security, quality, and economic risks in estate law. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that the best way to limit the damage of these hazards while simultaneously encouraging development and productive implementation of AI is a set of moderate regulations which encourage the use of AI to amplify the productivity of professionals rather than replace them in the workplace. Specifically, these regulations would require estate law devises written wholly with AI to (1) disclose their use of the technology, (2) include the prompt used to generate the will, and (3) include a testator-signed list of the risks of generating a will with AI.

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