AI and title work vs landmen?

How will AI be used to do some of the title work and research with oil and gas leasing?

Guessing it will start with Attorneys and title opnions. Then work its way down to land. Like every profession out there, its not a matter of if, just when the robot takes over your job. AI is already taking over doctors and attorneys jobs, its a crazy world we will be living in, Im 78 so not sure Ill see the real transition but I do worry about my grandkids and their futures.

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The same AI which makes up court decisions and advises people to glue cheese on pizza to keep it from falling off?

More likely AI will create false deed references or just take a phrase out of a deed and state that this is definitive, such as the legal description is 640 acres so you must own it all. One problem is the programmers put in their own biases and ignorance, and in addition certainly are not capable of nuancing legal interpretations based on court rulings and statutes and then applying to slightly different facts. Or recognizing that words can have legal meaning differing from every day use. I expect that we will just see more people thinking that they can save money by having AI write their deeds and wills and contracts without any legal review and then wondering why they and their heirs have a legal mess on their hands.

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An example or question is: If an abstract of title from patient, say in Texas from 1834 forward to the present, could be created by AI in the near future, shouldn’t this be a lot faster and more accurate speed? I’m not referring to any of the filed documents, deeds, court actions or proceedings being altered.

It seems that AI is still a long ways off from being able to interpret nuanced and unique granting and exception language in deeds, so having it generate an abstract of title based on recorded documents is one aspect, but really reading and interpreting that title as to what was conveyed will be an entirely different matter. As for land jobs and attorneys reading title and offering title opinions, it appears that those professionals who learn to work with it, but also how to quality control it for misinformation, will have the advantage in days to come, so I’m trying to learn how to work with it as a tool, but don’t expect to be replaced by it soon and not afraid of it, in general.

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If AI was asked to search the Deeds, and all Documents for every transaction that has been filed and recorded, say from a State like Texas for a particular tract of land, within a specific survey from 1834 to the Present, it should be very fast and accurate. I’m not talking about giving a title opinion but just producing all the documents like an Abstract of Title.

I’m sure AI can help in ways.

For instance, if AI were trained on certain clauses, it could help identify those clauses in your documents, as long as they’re written verbatim.

(I’m thinking of a situation when I was working in-house, when we needed to make sure a ton of leases had favorable consent to assign language before we could close the deal. If AI were trained on what a typical consent to assign clause in our acreage looked like, then it could have quickly identified the leases having that language. And we could have looked over only the leases it didn’t identify as having the clause. Instead, we had to scramble to read through all the leases, meaning we had to ‘train’ and trust people who didn’t know what they were looking for on what a consent to assign clause looks like.)

That said, AI like ChatGPT and other large language models (“LLMs”) don’t understand the text they’re processing. They regurgitate a bunch of characters, but they don’t know what any of it means. So if something is written slightly different, the LLM may not be as helpful as some people think.

I recently met with a company that is trying to use AI to speed up document interpretation. They’re early in development, but they’ve quickly realized they’re going to need to train an AI for each region they want to work in. That means they’ll need an AI for West Texas, one for East Texas, one for Pennsylvania, etc.

Using AI to help with title work is possible, but it’s not as easy as flipping a switch to replace 100% of the human input and output.

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