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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

#351
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Credentials are not the same as license. For example, software engineers do not need to pass any certification exams to practice software engineering, but companies still look at their education, years of experience, etc... Yes, it would make a recruitment process for doctors longer, as you would have to interview them, ask them questions to verify their medical knowledge, etc., but it is not impossible.

And yet, in your software example those companies overwhelming rely on degrees to credentialize candidates regardless of actual skill.

Licensing is merely a subset of the larger credentialing world. Even in your doctor example, the license is not the issue - board certification of a specialty would be the issue.

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at people who can't, for now at least.

Considering it's so bad it came to people's attention when it sent a subpoena to make sure someone came to testify against its client when he might have had a default judgement in his favour if they hadn't, I think the people who can't afford the lawyers have a lot more to be scared of than the lawyers...

And the reason lawyers are expensive is because bad legal advice usually costs far more in the long run.

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

#353

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…

LLM means Master of Law degree, kind of an advanced JD used in some specializations like tax. What do you mean here?

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

#354
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.

As noted by several lawyers when some of the details of this experiment were revealed: The AI already committed a cardinal sin of traffic court in that it subpoenaed the ticketing officer. Rule 1 of traffic court: If the state's witness (the ticketing officer) doesn't show, defendant gets off. You do not subpoena that witness, thereby ensuring they show up. If the AI or its handlers cannot be trusted to pregame the c…

> noted by several lawyers when some of the details of this experiment were revealed: The AI already committed a cardinal sin of traffic court in that it subpoenaed the ticketing officer

Would you have a source?

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

#355

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…

As a lawyer, I agree. Much of the trope of 'the lawyers always win' has a lot of truth to it, believe it or not. And all of the incentives align in this direction, it keeps the legal profession fat and happy and beholden to monied interests while suppressing access to the non-wealthy. And the rich don't actually care that they're being constantly fleeced, because it's just a cost of doing business that is really pretty finite in comparison to profits that can be made. It's almost like it's a feature of 'the system' (combination of capitalism and common law) and not an unintended side effect.

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

#356
post #353

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…

LLM means Master of Law degree, kind of an advanced JD used in some specializations like tax. What do you mean here?

In this context it means Large Language Model.

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

#357
post #353

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…

LLM means Master of Law degree, kind of an advanced JD used in some specializations like tax. What do you mean here?

Large Language Model

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

#358

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…

What would happen if a human lawyer did that?

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

#359

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…

What would happen if a human lawyer did that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disbarment

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

#360
post #29
post #9

I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary. If ChatGPT did something wrong, that lawyer would still be on the hook for deciding to continue using this tool so responsibility/liability/authenticity is not a problem. I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have a…

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…

>It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary bits though.

I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better APIs not accessible on the main page?) but it doesn't seem even close to being able to write pleadings or arguments.

It's surprising good at summarizing things that you might including pleadings or arguments though. But even then its got a 1/3 chance of fucking up massively.

But it's way more advanced than I imagined it would be. Very impressive technology.

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