On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times.
According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. “The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”
I wish they would clarify this statement. There’s a huge gap between, “Yeah, we pasted the questions into an LLM to check the grammar” and “Hey AI, generate some random Bar exam questions.”
One of my examples is using the AI tool in modern photo or video editors to select/mask an object. It’s not creating content, it’s basically just a more advanced version of the automatic selection/lasso tool.
And there’s a huge difference between that, and actually regurgitating remixed stolen content.