AI governance for privileged material.

The duty of supervision predates the language model by a century. It was written for people, then extended to non-lawyer staff, then to vendors holding client files. A language model is the next thing a firm has to supervise, and the obligation has not changed in character. What has changed is that the supervised party is a service that retains inputs, trains on them under some terms and not others, and produces output that reads as authoritative whether or not it is correct.

A governance document answers three questions in writing. Which tools may be used, and with what material. Where the material goes when a tool is used. Who reviews the output before it leaves the firm. A firm that can answer those three questions in a document has a defensible position. A firm that cannot has an undocumented practice, which is a different thing from a prohibited one and worse in an examination.

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