When law students at Vanderbilt University came back from their winter break last year, Mark Williams, associate director for collections and innovation at the school’s Alyne Queener Massey Law Library, felt something had changed.

“ChatGPT comes out in November 2022. I’m getting ready to teach my course … this time last year in January 2023 and something was different. The students were different,” Williams explained. “They had clearly spent that month over break interacting with this tool and were starting to even then understand the implication that this was something that the legal field needed to contend with.”