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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

#251

Post by Digory »

dools wrote: post #123

This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place. The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary evidence that I should not have been liable. After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay up now to avoid the risk. I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There…

Government doesn’t have time to deal with moderately informed opponents on individual tickets, so they don’t show up.

DNP should take the other side of this bet. AI for prosecution.

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

#252

Post by brookst »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #156
markogrady wrote: post #132

The HMCTS held a hackathon for the future tech in the UK court system a few years ago. The judges were people like the CEO of the courts, they also had lord chief justice. There were all sorts of firms like Linklaters, Pinsent Mason and Deloitte. We won with a simple Alexa lawyer that was to help poor rental tenants. It generated documents to send a landlord and possible legal advice. The idea was specifically for pe…

Apart from being different jurisdictions, they are different issues. The situation in the article involved a pro se litigant feeding courtroom proceedings to the AI and regurgitating its responses in real time. In that situation you are effectively handing your agency over to the AI. You can't really be said to be representing yourself in any real sense; you are mindlessly parroting what is fed to you. The situation…

Really good thoughts and treatment of the different issues. The line between “tool” and “agent” is blurry and will probably just keep getting blurrier. But I do think it’s important for our judicial system to ensure that any delegation of representation is to a very qualified third party, for both ethical and process/cost reasons.

I’m not sure the startup’s name is especially germane though. If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like 1-800-BEAT-DUI.

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

#254

Post by dogleash »

ovi256 wrote: post #194
jonstewart wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons. Car dealerships are for sure a clear example of regulatory capture, but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.

> all exist for good reasons Sure, but what's banned is surely not all medical or legal advice. I can browse case law or US code thinking about my case - somehow this does not need a legal license. At the other end of the continuum, talking to a lawyer about my case obviously needs him to be licensed. So now we're debating on which side of the cutoff using DoNotPay's robot must fall. The lawyers have made their mind…

>talking to a lawyer about my case obviously needs him to be licensed

Why's that obvious tho? Shouldn't it be on you to decide if you want a licensed lawyer? Isn't that the point of your post?

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

#255

Post by tablespoon »

deltarholamda wrote: post #236
tablespoon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no. And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice rec…

>The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system. Lawyers make la…

>> The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail

> That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.

> Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll.

And software has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the software engineer toll.

Life is complicated, and so is the law. Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think? I'm not saying the system is perfect, but railing against lawyers and getting rid of legal licensing is not the way to get to a better one.

> I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services?

You might have said that, but I doubt it would actually many real lawyers squirm any more than it would the idea of socialized software engineering would make developers squirm. And in any case, something like that already exists: the public defender's office.

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

#256

Post by lolinder »

naasking wrote: post #231
jonstewart wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons. Car dealerships are for sure a clear example of regulatory capture, but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.

> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons They were good reasons. By definition, disruptive technologies change the situation. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. You have to leave room for innovation or you stagnate.

ChatGPT is not disruptive enough to be used in law, end of story. It's a very impressive language model, but like any language model it will hallucinate, inventing arguments that sound impressive on a surface level but bear no legal authority whatsoever. That's simply not acceptable in a courtroom.

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

#257

Post by giantg2 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #242
lostlogin wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? I’d say that an industry with significant health, safety or financial risk should require regulation and licensing. Your example seems a bit crazy.

The funny thing is that doctors would be the canonical examples for most people. Yet, there is no license that stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery. What stops the pediatrician from performing brain surgery is that no hospital would hire them as a brain surgeon, no insurance would insure their brain surgery and if something goes wrong they'd likely face a lawsuit they couldn't win. Why is the system abl…

The answer is in your question.

It's the credentialing. The pediatrician lacks the credentials of a neurosurgeon. Just as non-doctors lack the credentials to work as a doctor. The hosptial, insurance, and court would all be looking at the credentials.

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

#258

Post by Digory »

asah wrote: post #35
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…

Real lawyers can do these things too. The issue is that we cannot punish or disbar ChatGPT for misbehavior like this.

Right. The reason legal fees are so expensive is that the courts are kept semi-efficient by offloading costs to lawyers.

The system needs repeat players, who are scared of being disbarred. You can triple the number of lawyers, and costs won’t decrease much.

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

#259

Post by gfodor »

lolinder wrote: post #246

This company is either run by someone who doesn't understand the tech or is willfully fraudulent. ChatGPT and company are far from good enough to be entrusted with law. Having interacted extensively with modern LLMs, I absolutely know something like this would happen: > Defendant (as dictated by AI): The Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Smith in 1978... > Judge: There was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978. LLMs hallu…

If this is the case, the lawyers should have nothing to fear, and the plaintiff nothing to lose but a parking ticket. I say we stop arguing and run the experiment.

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

#260

Post by saint_fiasco »

squarefoot wrote: post #146

AI lawyers indeed look scary, but I can't but think of the implications should they become one day way cheaper than carbon based ones. Imagine all those cases where $BIGCORP is technically in the wrong, but today can screw some poor sap just by dragging things until he can't afford legal defense anymore.

The $BIGCORP can use the tool too, it's not exactly asymmetric. Imagine what a patent troll could accomplish with something like this if it were allowed.
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