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AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

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Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#101

Post by etchalon »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #72
in3d wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I can’t ever write clearly on the phone, this site is very mobile-unfriendly. I meant that defendants would be able to talk to the AI about their case to learn as much as they want. A public defender can’t commit that much time to each of their cases.

The problem with this is "how do you assure the AI isn't bold face lying to the defendant". For a natural text generation/chat system like ChatGPT, at the moment this is effectively impossible and frankly I don't see it being sufficiently fixed for something as complex as teaching law to a non-law-student any time in the near future.

I think these discussions always seem focused on the ideal state of the "AI is perfect and gives correct answers" and not the current state where the "AI constructs sentences that are structured correctly, but are filled with inaccuracies and illogical nonsense."

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#103

Post by timdaub »

Call me old fashioned, but an entrepreneur like Browder or Bankman-Fried, the type of guys that don‘t know what a workout is and that fail to clean their rooms when Vice stops by: Why are the top VCs investing in them?

Isn‘t the room or fitness of someone a reflection of their self and their mental health? Sure, messiness is easily solved by hiring someone to clean: But isn‘t it telling about their reflection capabilities and their handling of stress?

- Vice: https://youtu.be/4ywSt641A58

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#104

Post by krisoft »

somenameforme wrote: post #32
paxys wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Technology is the perfect solution for problems like these. So many societal issues today arise because systems developed centuries ago cannot keep up with a population that has grown exponentially since then. Tech's core feature is being able to scale. There will be more and more systemic reliance on automation and AI as time goes on, since that's the only sensible way out.

Tech often misses obvious downsides, especially human, in pursuit of unrealistic idealism. A good lawyer is not just knowledgeable of law, but of people. He needs to get 12 people in front of him to agree with him. And he may even be actively misleading them when he's defending a someone whom he knows to be guilty. This comes down to reading people, reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people ne…

> A good lawyer is not just knowledgeable of law, but of people. He needs to get 12 people in front of him to agree with him.

While I agree with you that AI powered lawyer can have many downsides and drawbacks here you are building on a falsehood.

There is this illusions that computers are "book smart" but not "street smart". It is very deeply ingrained into our culture. Just think about Data from Star Trek. Very analytical, but struggles to understand emotions. Therefore also struggles to manipulate people's emotions, aka being emotionally persuasive.

This is a sci-fi trope, but is false as it comes to these generative models. (or can be false depending on training data) If you train the system with mock juries it can learn how to twist them around its finger. Text written by such a model can be as emotionally persuasive as one written by the best lawyer.

In fact in reality, as the tech is today, it would be easier to reliably implement the "reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people needs to hear to have them act like he wants" part than the "follows flawless logic, legal technicalities to a T" part.

It is of course still a very perilous path to make an AI-powered lawyer. It is just important to not base our reasoning on sci-fi tropes

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#105

Post by iso1631 »

paxys wrote: post #15
ausbah wrote: post #6

>The ultimate goal, according to Browder, is to democratize legal representation by making it free for those who can't afford it, in some cases eliminating the need for pricey attorneys. this is the core issue I have with companies and tech like this: they try to solve social issues with technology and business. the issue of accessible defense is an issue of institutional failure that rests on the shoulders of the st…

I disagree. Technology is the perfect solution for problems like these. So many societal issues today arise because systems developed centuries ago cannot keep up with a population that has grown exponentially since then. Tech's core feature is being able to scale. There will be more and more systemic reliance on automation and AI as time goes on, since that's the only sensible way out.

> So many societal issues today arise because systems developed centuries ago cannot keep up with a population that has grown exponentially since then.

If you had 1 lawyer per 100 people in 1800 and you had 1 lawyer per 100 people today, I don't see a scaling problem with population.

Indeed in the UK in 2012 there were 120,000 solicitors for 64 million

Today it's 160,000 for 68 million

That's a 30% increase in lawyers with a 6% increase in population.

Why do we need more lawyers per person today than 10 years ago?

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#107

Post by classified »

> democratize legal representation

I call BS on this. Once it stops consistently landing its users in prison, the "AI" attorney will be just as expensive as a real one. And in the unlikely case that it ever becomes better than a human lawyer, it will also be more expensive.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#108

Post by torstenvl »

aww_dang wrote: post #83
Aerroon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem with law isn't the number of people, it's with the number of laws/binding contracts. If the US government can't even count the number of possible ways you can commit a crime then how is any of it supposed to work?

This is a feature, not a bug for the classes which benefit from the ever expanding legal corpus. Coincidentally, politicians and lobbyists are often lawyers themselves.

That's the opposite of true. And I think you know that. It's absolutely insane that HN of all places is arguing against the concept of locality-of-reference.

Given the Option A (letting DoJ prosecutors only have to carry around Title 18) versus Option B (letting lay people looking up a topic by subject matter see what crimes and penalties pertain to that subject matter in the title for that subject matter), which one is friendlier to lawyers? Which one is friendlier to lay people?

Yeah, a DoJ official in 1982 probably found it inconvenient that 17 U.S.C. § 506 and 18 U.S.C. § 2319 aren't in the same deadtree volume for them to lug around. But if I'm a lay person, I'm glad that the criminal penalties for copyright infringement aren't invisible from within the chapter on copyright infringement in the title on copyright.

If I were to perform a code review for a junior engineer, and they had structured their source files so that all the constructors and destructors for all of their classes were in one independent file, rather than co-located with the classes to which they pertain, they would not pass code review. The argument that it's difficult to even know how many constructors and destructors they have, and therefore memory management is too complex, would be distinctly unpersuasive. It baffles and frustrates me that HN seems to come to the exact opposite conclusion with regard to the law.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#109

Post by pibechorro »

ausbah wrote: post #6

>The ultimate goal, according to Browder, is to democratize legal representation by making it free for those who can't afford it, in some cases eliminating the need for pricey attorneys. this is the core issue I have with companies and tech like this: they try to solve social issues with technology and business. the issue of accessible defense is an issue of institutional failure that rests on the shoulders of the st…

Its a state created problem and you expect them to solve it? Private entities are the way these problems are always solved efficiently. Cant wait for lawyers to be obsolete personally.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#110

Post by gamegoblin »

mdorazio wrote: post #98
gamegoblin wrote: post #89

Once this tech gets good, and everyone has access to a high-powered legal team for pennies, I am a little concerned that anyone will be able to DDoS the legal system. It's already possible for giant corporations to bury smaller actors in paperwork. They can and do crush people with this. What happens when everyone has this ability?

We revisit the legal system itself and hopefully replace it with something better?

I'm not sure if we (at least, in the US) have the institutional capacity to do so.

The legal system is interesting because it operates within its own framework.

Industries can be disrupted from the outside. People switch when the next best thing comes along: horses to cars, gas to electric, wired to wireless.

The legal system can only be (legally) disrupted from the inside, from within itself. If AI tech gums up the legal system itself, how will we use the legal system to fix the legal system? Regime change / revolution is probably not ideal.

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