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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

#271

Post by deltarholamda »

tablespoon wrote: post #255
deltarholamda wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 m…

>Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think

I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered?

The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making even a simple Windows application can be very complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows itself? Can your application be replicated with a combination of existing Unix tools? Depends on the application, of course, but there is certainly a lot of cruft floating around the Windows API space.

And let's also not forget that (often) one of the main purposes of commercial software is to lock you in to that particular piece of software. Same same with the legal system and lawyers.

The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.

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

#272

Post by shubb »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #159
shubb wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If GPT can pass an MBA paper, can a carefully trained chatbot mixed with hand coded logic pass a bar exam?

Only four states allow people to take the bar exam without earning a juris doctorate (J.D.) from law school. And three other states require some law school experience but do not require graduating with a J.D. So in 43 states the answer is no. A chatbot never attended law school and doesn't have a J.D., so it can't take the exam. If it can't take the exam, it can't pass. I suppose if you could get the chatbot permissi…

Doesn't this just open the question of whether the chatbot can get a JD?

The other angle is whether the chatbot can be equivalent to a process which a proper person can rubber stamp. For instance, a professional engineer might run a pre-written structural engineering model against their building design and certify that the building was sound - and then stand up in court and say they had followed standard process.

It seems weirdest here that the court is treating the chatbot as a person. Lawyers use computer tools all the time for discovery, and then use that information to make arguments in court as a proper person.

You can represent yourself in court without being a lawyer, so isn't a person doing so just a proper person rubber stamping a an electronic output?

It feels like this court decision, that an electronic tool is not a proper person, is some kind of case law that chat bots are people. I don't think they are.

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

#273

Post by tablespoon »

deltarholamda wrote: post #271
tablespoon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 m…

>Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered? The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making even a simple Windows application can be very complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows itself? Can you…

> I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered?

I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here.

> The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.

Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good. It can (and has) gotten us to "he's innocent because he murdered a black man and the jury doesn't like blacks."

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

#274

Post by lolinder »

ethanbond wrote: post #261
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…

DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing. It really doesn’t strike me as true that law requires absolute precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far) arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that shatter credibility, but that’s very different from “get one thing wrong and the system doesn’t work at all or works in wildly…

There are also many adjacent algorithms that could solve the same problem, but you still need to execute the algorithm correctly. LLMs are not ready for unsupervised use in any domain outside of curiosity, and what DoNotPay is proposing would be to let one roam free in a courtroom.

I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting an LLM in court is deeply problematic, even if the stakes are low in this particular category of law.

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

#275

Post by enraged_camel »

lolinder wrote: post #270
gfodor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Non-lawyers aren't banned from giving legal advice because lawyers are trying to protect their jobs, they're banned from giving legal advice because they're likely to be bad at it, and the people who take their advice are likely to be hurt. Yes, in this case, it would just be a parking ticket, but the legal system runs on precedent and it's safer to hold a strict line than to create a fuzzy "well, it depends on how m…

>> Non-lawyers aren't banned from giving legal advice because lawyers are trying to protect their jobs, they're banned from giving legal advice because they're likely to be bad at it, and the people who take their advice are likely to be hurt.

But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.

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

#276

Post by watwut »

harimau777 wrote: post #200
watwut wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty bad example. In theory, bail should be affordable to the individual person. It is meant to be insurance that you come back for actual court date. The outrage there is bails being set to unaffordable sizes for poor people. OP was picking out the case where bail functioned as intended.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. It still means that the rich aren't in jail in situations where the poor are.

The complaint however was not about inequality. The comment which started thread made no concern about inequality or poor.

The complaint was purely about rich people avoiding jail prior sentencing due to being able to pay bail. This was called dystopian.

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

#277

Post by jonathanwallace »

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…

> there is absolutely no space for hallucination in a court of law

I wish you were factually correct here.

We've seen time and time again where courts are mockeries of the ideal because of the people in them and the faults they bring with them.

E.g. see https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-418_i425.pdf and the documented proof in the dissent contradicting the claims in the ruling.

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

#278

Post by lolinder »

pintxo wrote: post #268

Absolute precision? Have you read any law lately? Legal texts are (to me) surprisingly imprecise. One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. I mean, comma/and/or separated lists in full text? Not even parenthesis? That’s not precision.

I'm not so much concerned about precision of language (although that does matter in some contexts) as I am in precision of facts and precedence.

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

#279

Post by watwut »

epups wrote: post #173
watwut wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually OK and correct for justice system to NOT keep people in jail prior sentencing unless necessary. It is dishonest to conflate "not being sentenced yet" with "got out".

If that's the case, why involve money in it? About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it. Of course bail is a mechanism for differential treatment between rich and poor in the judicial system.

I am not defending bail as a system. However, the system in USA relies on it. The complaint here was not that poor people stay in jail. The complain was purely about someone being able to pay bail.

> About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it.

This means 2/3 of arrested people can afford bail or are released without it. A case of single rich person having affordable bail is not exactly proof of inequality here. Poor people who had low enough bail they were able to pay do exist too.

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

#280

Post by BitwiseFool »

iso1631 wrote: post #41
epups wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers The rich don't go to jail already. The crypto scammer paid a huge bail and got out on his private jet. That, to me, is far more dystopian than a cheap tool to help people appeal traffic tickets.

Every time I see this "traffic ticket" thing, it usually looks like 1) The driver was actually speeding and 2) The driver is trying to get off on a technicality Is that the case? In the US do you get "points" on your driving license so that if you are caught speeding several times in the space of a couple of years you get banned? In the UK being caught mildly speeding (say doing 60 in a 50), in the course of 3 years…

For traffic tickets, it is often possible to go to court and have the judge offer a reduced fine for pleading guilty or no contest (you don't admit guilt, but you don't plead innocence and accept the punishment).

Most people, when they want to fight such tickets, think they can argue their way out of it. Whereas the judge and officers simply just want to get the hearings over with. They do hundreds of such hearings a week and have heard it all before. So, the judge will tell the courtroom that they can get a reduction and how to get it. Sadly, the defendants are anxious, have been mentally preparing themselves for a fight, and are in an unfamiliar environment so they tend to get tunnel vision and choose to plead 'not guilty'. They inevitably loose.

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, pay close attention to what the judge offers everyone before the hearings begin. If they don't offer such a bargain, when it is your time to appear before the judge you can ask "would the court consider a reduction in exchange for a plea of no contest?" It doesn't hurt to ask.

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