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An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

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Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#61

Post by joshka »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #34
joshka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, reference the same issues with legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice. It's not…

Is this using chatGPT or gpt3 though? There's a big difference, a fine-tuned llm can do leaps and bounds better than chatGPT. I'm thinking a good SaaS might just be train localized llm's for every city, state, county law and partition the lm based on where it can seek info, then just use it as one big search engine, and of course work in citations, etc.

Take a look at https://www.legalquestions.help/ which gets the above issues wrong at times enough to not rely on it. Maybe their training was bad or insufficient (and I fully expect that sometime in the future this not to be the case).

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#62

Post by eru »

PostOnce wrote: post #2

You can't just start practicing law without a license, you'll ruin somebody's life; they'll assume you, or the computer, knows what is going on, when in fact you just want Free Dollars. I don't want Dr. iPad Joe who spent a grand total of 15 minutes learning how to use ChatGPT making legal, medical, engineering, or other important decisions for me or the place I live. Now, I am of course free to use ChatGPT as a priv…

> I know we all hate regulations, but some of them exist for a reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had regulations.

That's not the only reason regulations exist.

And most 'Bad Shit' can already be dealt with via existing rules, instead of specific new regulations. But making new rules sounds good to the voters and can also be a powergrab.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#63

Post by bayindirh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #49
bayindirh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the AI gets better people will trust it AI is just informed search, a dwarf sitting on shoulders of human knowledge. There were medical "expert systems" in 2000s, yet we still have doctors. In my understanding, in most cases AI will be a glorified assistant, not an authoritative decision-maker. Otherwise in collides head-on with barriers and semis. I won't trust such system even with a parking ticket, yet alone…

Whatever it is, it's getting better. And lots of people would rather have a glorified assistant than nothing.

> Whatever it is, it's getting better.

Yeah, telling grammatically correct but factually wrong things, having biases, crashing into things, and whatnot.

> And lots of people would rather have a glorified assistant than nothing.

An assistant which can't be checked for accuracy, or for telling the truth.

The future is bright!

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#64

Post by RandomLensman »

rcme wrote: post #52
RandomLensman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law jurisdictions, too)? Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").

> because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong" Most countries try to guarantee access to a surgeon when one is needed.

Where I live, insurance for civil litigation is actually pretty cheap. For criminal cases, my understanding is that in a lot of places you will be given a lawyer if you cannot pay for one as a defendant.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#65

Post by mach1ne »

Barrin92 wrote: post #22

Absolutely atrocious stunt on the part of that company. A glorified chatbot is not itself legally accountable or trained lawyer and it cannot seriously represent anyone. I assume the entire purpose of this was to bait the obvious shutdown and then complain on the internet about the legacy lawyers or whatever to generate press. Reminds me of the 'sentient AI' Google guy. Is this going to be the new grift in the indust…

I'm not familiar just how large cases it's supposed to tackle, but for small stuff like parking tickets a few solid legal arguments may be enough and you don't need to pay for tens of hours of lawyer's time.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#66

Post by madsbuch »

rcme wrote: post #52
RandomLensman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law jurisdictions, too)? Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").

> because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong" Most countries try to guarantee access to a surgeon when one is needed.

In Denmark there is "fri process" that will ensure a lawyer is provided when really needed and you can't afford it – my guess is that other countries have similar systems.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#67

Post by Dylan16807 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #58
Dylan16807 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a problem? Do they get bail a second time? Do you think they wouldn't reoffend if they weren't released until after they are punished? If they do two crimes and get two sentences, does it matter if that's AABB or ABAB?

Well, because there are now e.g. two cases of murder instead of only one, and the second one was entirely preventable? Oh, right, the law is not about the populace's lives and well-being, how silly of me to assume that.

You didn't answer my questions. Do you think it would decrease the odds of reoffending if they didn't get bail?

If it doesn't, then it's two crimes either way, just timed differently. And after the policy settled in it would have negligible impact on the crime rate.

Also if you're doing sentencing for two crimes at once you can give a longer punishment for the first crime and get them off the street longer.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#68

Post by smorrebrod »

dubcanada wrote: post #44

I always found lawyers to be interesting… they are not responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your case. But if they mess up, that doesn’t send them to jail. You can fire them or report them. But that’s it. You’re still screwed. Really the only one in the court working for you, is yourself. So ideally we’d make it easier to represent yourself. As long as your capable of doing such. I quite like this i…

I don't know if that's what you're talking about but you can sue your lawyer for professional negligence if they didn't do their job properly.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#69

Post by brigandish »

RandomLensman wrote: post #37
rcme wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the need for lawyers a tragedy. Interactions with the judicial system are often some of the most important events in a person’s life. The fact that it’s necessary to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to help navigate the arcane process is sad and shouldn’t be necessary. It would be one thing if laws were meaningfully written down, so that anyone could read the statutes and build their own ar…

Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law jurisdictions, too)? Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").

We all use technology to treat ourselves in lieu of a surgeon all the time, whether it's a Google search, a plaster, or cough medicine or whatever. Are you going to give up all the advances that differentiate your situation from that of someone in say, 17th century Europe, because an expert should do it because they're an expert?

No thanks. I'll take advances that make things easy enough to avoid experts wherever I can get it and leave the bloodlettings (which, with lawyers, will be from your bank account) to others.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#70

Post by xienze »

jeroenhd wrote: post #14
charcircuit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin someone's life?

ChatGPT lies. It makes up facts, sources, and nonsense arguments. Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court. ChatGPT also assumes you're speaking the truth. If you ask it about a topic and say "that's wrong, the actual facts are..." then it'll change argumentation to support your position. You probably don't want your legal…

> Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.

Then I suppose that's just the risk the defendant takes, isn't it? Let people use ChatGPT, if the rope they're given ends up hanging enough people, that'll be the end of that, won't it?

Also, everyone is ignoring the possibility that this same person could've had ChatGPT generate a script (general outline of arguments, "what do I say if asked this" type of stuff), memorized it, and used that to guide his self-defense. Fundamentally, no difference. No one would've known, and no one would've objected.

To me, this move is less "oh we need to protect people from getting bad legal advice from a robot" and "we're not even gonna let this thing be used a single time in court to keep our job from being automated."

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