Is AI moving in on the turf of licensed professionals?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

About one in four jobs in the U.S.

Requires an occupational license. That's according to the

National Conference of State Legislatures. Licensing requirements differ by state and can affect

everyone from barbers to lawyers. The general idea is to keep unqualified workers out,

but technology, and specifically AI, is making inroads.

Rebecca Haa Allen'sworth is a law professor at Vanderbilt University.

She's the author of a new book out today called The Licensing Racket,

How We Decide Who Is Allow to Work and Why It Goes Wrong.

She told me in some instances that tech is letting consumers bypass licensed workers altogether.

I mean, this has been true for a while, but it's really become intense now that AI is what it is.

You can go on ChatGPT and say something like, you know, write me a contract for funeral services,

and ChatGPT will spit out a contract.

That has forever been the practice of law,

and that's been limited until this point to people who have a license in law.

But now AI is kind of getting in on that practice of law, even though there have been lawsuits to try to stop it.

Yeah, it's hard to know who to sue. So if you were not a lawyer, if you were just an unlicensed person and you were writing contracts for people, the bar might come after you and say you're engaged in the unlawful, unlicensed practice of law and you have to stop, you know, cease and desist letter.

With technology these days, it's a little bit hard to figure out who was writing that contract,

you know, should I get in trouble for asking the prompt? Should Open AI as a company have some liability for this? And if that were the case, how on earth would we figure out what actually

is happening at the company level? So, yeah, it's breaking down some of the

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