In this video, attorney Brittany Ratelle explains how online entrepreneurs can safely and legally incorporate AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL·E, Canva, and Bard into their businesses. She begins with a disclaimer that her advice is informational, not a substitute for personal legal counsel, and stresses that AI should be used as a tool, not a replacement for human creativity, especially because U.S. copyright law requires human authorship. Ratelle highlights the risk of AI‑generated “hallucinations,” citing a recent case where a lawyer submitted fabricated case citations generated by ChatGPT and faced potential sanctions. She then provides four practical tips: (1) using AI to draft contracts, demand letters, liability waivers, and cease‑and‑desist letters, emphasizing the need for specific prompts and human review; (2) employing AI to review contracts by extracting purpose, key terms, duration, and consideration; (3) leveraging AI to explain contract clauses in plain language, illustrated with an indemnification clause; and (4) reminding creators to register copyrights and trademarks to strengthen enforcement. Throughout, she advises consulting an attorney for complex or industry‑specific matters and offers a downloadable cheat‑sheet. The video concludes with a call to like, subscribe, and access further resources.
Chapters
Have you ever wondered how artificial intelligence can help you in your online business and whether it's even safe, professional, or even legal to be using these AI tools as you try to promote and sell your offerings? I'm attorney Brittany Ratelle, and today we're going to be diving into such tools of ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL·E, Canva, or Bard, and revealing my top secrets as an actual online business attorney about how you can use these. As a reminder, while I'm an attorney for online business owners just like you, I'm not your attorney. All the information that you see here today is just for informational purposes only. However, I hope that it's gonna be really helpful for me to be able to guide you through some of the tips and tricks I've learned in helping hundreds of online entrepreneurs just like you get themselves legally legit. So the first thing we wanna keep in mind is to give a little disclaimer about artificial intelligence. While ChatGPT is definitely having a moment this year, and there's lots of people who are using this successfully in your business, something to keep in mind though is that when we wanna be using AI, we really want it to be using it as a tool in our business and not replacing the unique human element, especially with regards to creators. Work. Something that I wanna make really clear is that currently under US copyright law, you cannot protect the copyright for any work that is not created by a human. For example, a couple months ago, someone tried to submit a copyright registration for a graphic novel. They got the copyright registration, they celebrated and even made a kind of big PR deal about, hey, we're able to get this copyright registration. And FYI, most of it was created using AI. Well, just kidding. The Copyright Office reached out back and said, you're not gonna be able to keep this copyright registration because under US law as it currently stands, creative works have to be created by a human and not by robots or by computers. And so if you are looking to use AI in your business, you first want to consider, am I adding a human touch to this? And how much of a percentage am I relying on computers and AI to create the work? Especially if these are things that you want to monetize. This is especially true if you are creating any type of digital product, or if you're using AI to help you with branding or logo development, be very careful about what influences are going into the database that your AI AI is being used from. If it's scraping a bunch of images off the internet, those things may not be in the public domain. You may not have a license to use them, and your end product might be too close to someone else's work where you could be liable for either copyright or trademark infringement if you use that commercially in your business. Something else to be aware of is that there's several documented cases of false confidence where people have used AI and asked it specifically about case law or statutes, and the AI has made things up instead of saying, I don't know, or I'm not qualified to do that. In fact, just a few weeks ago, a personal injury attorney in New York got in serious trouble with the court for filing a brief with the court about a personal injury complaint and citing 6 different cases. Turns out those 6 cases he cited were completely made up, and he admitted that he used ChatGPT and AI to help him write that brief. The judge in this case, it was obviously super perturbed by it, and this lawyer could face sanctions. Number 1, remember, use carefully as a tool and know the limits and boundaries around AI. Let's talk about tip number 2. How do we use AI to draft a contract. Are you ready to fire your attorney? Maybe don't be so quick on that drop, but I do think that there's a role for AI to help us in contract drafting, mostly the kind of agreements that frankly you can already find for free on the internet, and they're pretty simple and straightforward. For example, here are some great prompts that I have used that you can put into ChatGPT or another AI machine and get decent results. You could ask it to draft a such and such contract or a contract type between party 1 and party 2, and you can name those. For consideration in a certain jurisdiction. You can ask it to write a demand letter between two parties for certain injuries or for a certain deal in a jurisdiction. You can ask it to write a liability waiver. Now with this, for a product, I recommend that you be pretty specific. You can ask it to draft waivers. For example, I asked it to draft a liability waiver for an in-person sewing class for teenagers, and it actually did a pretty good job. But note that I got a better result when I gave more specific information to the AI. And this is going to be consistent across using any AI tool is the more specific information and inputs, the better outputs you're going to give, because it's trying to be a learning model, but it's also relying on being able to search its database and really pinpoint, and it's going to be able to give you a better result, the better information. How do you get better information of knowing what legal terms to include? Well, that's when it's still probably really helpful to work with an attorney or to be able to at least consult and get some questions answered and see an initial legal document and be able to use that as a base for what you should be understanding. You can also ask AI to help draft payment letters. If you have a customer service issue, if someone is late on paying you, or you have a bad credit card, or there's something else that's gone wrong in your payment for goods or services, ask AI to do a payment demand letter for X and put the X here. Obviously, the more specific information about the contract that you can put in, the better it's going to be. So again, maybe ask it to draft a demand letter and then go back to your contract and see, are there specific payment clauses that you can highlight and add that language in? Can you attach the contract as an exhibit or an attachment? And that's going to give you better results. Another area where you can use it to draft a contract that I think AI is doing a decent job job is ask for cease and desist. And these can be used for both copyright and trademark issues, remembering that copyright protects our creative works or original creative things like audio, video, text, while trademark is going to protect our branding, our assets, our logos, our catchphrases, our product. Try this prompt: draft a copyright infringement cease and desist letter for the unauthorized use of a YouTube video, citing relevant U.S. law. As a little practice note, you're going to get better results and have a much higher chance of someone taking the cease and desist seriously if you've registered the copyright for your work before having someone rip it off. If you are in the business of being a creator, if that is how you make your money, make sure you are looking and working into your workflow of registering the copyright to your works. Not just putting the copyright statement on, but actually registering the works with the U.S. Copyright Office. In terms of trademark infringement, here's a prompt you can try: draft a trademark infringement cease and desist letter for the unauthorized use of a trademark for the name of an Etsy shop, citing relevant U.S. law. Make sure you check out some of my other videos if you have more questions on intellectual property and what are the right that you should be using in your business to protect yourself. And let's get to our third tip, how to use AI to review a contract. So say that you've received a contract in your business and you don't even know where to start with it. And so what you can do is you can actually copy and paste the whole text of a contract into AI and then give it some parameters around that. Note that to do this, you're going to have to get a pretty clean text version of the contract. Sometimes there's a couple formatting wonkiness, but you can get around that. Here's a prompt you can try with that. You can say, review the following contract and provide me the purpose of the contract, the 3 most important terms, the duration, and the consideration in the bulleted list. And then you put a parenthesis and insert the entire contract in there. You can also ask it, what are the key terms to negotiate for this contract? Note that depending on how complex of a contract is or how industry specific, if it's a really niche industry or an industry that's newer, these contracts are still fairly new for a lot of entities and there's not a ton of them that are online. And it might not catch or know to prompt you that these are the key things you need to negotiate. If you're looking from scratch of what things you should be looking out in any contract and how can you redline, make sure you check out another one of my videos and you'll get some great tips there. And then let's get to our 4th and final tip, how to explain a contract clause. How can you use AI to explain to you specific language in an agreement so that you can understand it, that you can maybe explain it to a client or a customer or the other side? For example, you can put in a clause, and this is usually going to be a single paragraph, and ask it to explain it to me. You can ask ask ChatGPT to make it more authoritative, playful, casual, understandable. For example, I did a little test with an indemnification clause, and these clauses are really common in a lot of contracts, especially when we're dealing with intellectual property or people's offerings. An indemnification clause is basically a fancy way of saying if something goes wrong, if you break a promise in this agreement, this person is going to handle the legal fees and step up for the legal defense of either party. They're the ones who should be shouldering that burden versus the smaller independent freelancer who's really not controlling that, but I put the language into AI and asked it to explain, and it did a pretty decent job. It gave me a really good result when I put it in and I said, explain it to me like I'm 5. Those were some magic words. And then it gave it a very basic understanding of what an indemnification clause is. So these are the main ways that you can use AI in your business. Obviously they're not exhaustive. And if you want all these tips in a ready and handy cheat sheet, make sure you go and get into the comments and I'll have a link for you to be able to download a freebie here. And that way you can start using this and your online small business to maybe help you understand some of the confusing legal stuff and issues that might come up as you're navigating your digital online business. Thanks so much for being here. Again, I'm attorney Brittany Ratelle, and make sure you like and subscribe this channel if you haven't already, so that you don't miss out on any of the tips and videos I have to help you get your business legally legit.
