Scriba vs ChatGPT
Scriba vs ChatGPT — general chat vs a grounded reading desk.
Brainstorming, rewriting a sentence, or explaining a doctrine in plain English.
Writing an actual brief you would hand to a professor, with citations that trace back to the source.
The honest breakdown
ChatGPT is a general chat model. It will happily write you a FIRAC brief that looks correct and cites cases that do not exist. Scriba is a workspace built around the opposite constraint: the assistant can only cite passages you highlighted, and every case name carries a red verify chip until you check it.
| Feature | Scriba | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| Cites only passages you highlighted | Yes | No — invents cites |
| Anchors from brief to source text | Yes | No |
| One workspace per course | Yes | One long chat |
| Export to Word / PDF / Anki with disclosure appendix | Yes | Copy-paste |
| General Q&A on any topic | No — study only | Yes |
| Image generation, voice, agents | No | Yes |
| Honor-code disclosure baked in | Yes | No |
Switching from ChatGPT — a short guide
- Stop pasting opinions into ChatGPT. Open them in Scriba’s Reader instead.
- Highlight the passages that would answer the question you were about to ask.
- Ask Scriba’s Assistant the same question — the answer will be grounded in what you highlighted.
- Keep ChatGPT for the tasks that never involved case law in the first place.
Objections we hear
Doesn’t ChatGPT have a “deep research” mode now?
Yes, and it still hallucinates cases. General-purpose research modes are not built for the specific constraint of citing only text the student read. Scriba’s constraint is a design choice, not a capability gap.
Can I paste an opinion into ChatGPT and ask for a brief?
You can, and you should not — check your honor code first. Even where allowed, the output is ungrounded: it cites lines that aren’t in the text you pasted. Scriba only cites lines you highlighted.
Is ChatGPT still useful alongside Scriba?
Yes — for the everyday non-legal writing tasks Scriba doesn’t do. Use ChatGPT to draft an email. Use Scriba to write your brief.