I have recently heard a couple of common UK employment law myths being bandied around more often than usual and wanted to see if ChatGPT could provide some answers, or if the AI was actually the culprit.
I decided to pose as an employer and ask for ChatGPT's advice on a hypothetical (and entirely fictional) redundancy round - a topic on which I regularly give advice myself. My conclusion after a 10 minute conversation? It's not quite there.
It is, of course, impressively quick at assimilating information and producing a few coherent paragraphs on pretty much any topic. However, I had three main issues:
- Without specifying which jurisdiction I was asking about, I received answers that were applicable to the USA rather than UK employment law. For those with any background knowledge, it will usually be easy to tell pretty quickly that the answers being given are inappropriate, but this is not always the case where the terminology used is very similar. Including a reference to the UK within my question did however yield more specific, and therefore accurate, results.
- The advice I received was very high level. A generic statement like 'employees need two years' service to claim unfair dismissal', is appropriate in most cases, but can be nuanced and does not account for other claims such as automatic unfair dismissals for whistleblowing and discrimination that can also be risk factors in a redundancy termination. Furthermore, the bot did not note that the two years can in some cases be 'one year and 51 weeks' where a payment in lieu of notice is made. ChatGPT wasn't in a position to ask me the right follow up questions to establish whether I needed more detailed advice.
- And it got things wrong. As predicted, I was presented with some common employment law myths – for example, that it is possible to set redundancy pay off against notice pay (it is not). There were also references to some old law that has now been replaced – for example around the taxable nature of non-contractual payments in lieu of notice (this law changed in 2018 and so well before the 'cut off' date for the data on which ChatGPT was trained). It also gave some suggestions for ways to save tax that were irrelevant in a redundancy context, and actually gave me different answers to the same question when I asked it in different ways.
To give it some credit, the bot did tell me with each answer it gave that I should seek guidance from legal experts who could advise on my individual situation.
I should say that, in principle, I am very much in favour of the development and integration of AI into our working lives to improve efficiency, accuracy and automate the more straightforward tasks that are nobody's favourite thing to do. However, for now I would recommend you take ChatGPT's advice and always speak to a professional about your redundancy questions.
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