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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

#381

Post by sigmoid10 »

weatherlite wrote: post #373
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…

They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true anymore.

I'd also argue that "hallucination" is, at least in some form, pretty commonplace in courtrooms. Neither lawyers' nor judges' memories are foolproof and eyewitness studies show that humans don't even realise how much stuff their brain makes up on the spot to fill blanks. If nothing else, I expect AI to raise awareness for human flaws in the current system.

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

#382

Post by aardvarkr »

weatherlite wrote: post #373
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…

They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true anymore.

Being connected to the internet may make their information more up to date but they won’t stop being confidently incorrect. These language models are amazing at token prediction but it’s a mistake to believe that they’re actually intelligent.

Give it an inane prompt to better see the difference, like "write me an essay about camels and their value in cybersecurity" which gives us the answer

"The camel is a valuable animal in the cybersecurity field due to its ability to store large amounts of data in its hump. Camels are able to cross vast distances with little water, which makes them ideal for carrying large amounts of data across networks. They are also very sturdy animals, able to withstand harsh conditions and even attacks from cyber criminals. In addition, their long eyelashes protect their eyes from sand and dust, making them perfect for working in dusty environments such as data centers."

Having internet access wouldn’t fix this.

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

#383

Post by gfodor »

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…

Ultimately though the argument you have set up here seems to make it all but impossible for AI to displace humans in the legal profession. If the argument is "precedent rules" then "only humans can be lawyers" is precedent.

I'm not sure if this particular case with this particular technology made sense - but I do think we need to encourage AI penetration of the legal profession, in a way that has minimal downside risk. (For defendants and plaintiffs, not lawyers.) It would be hugely beneficial for society if access to good legal advice was made extremely cheap.

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

#384

Post by Dylan16807 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #339
Dylan16807 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't assume that someone coming out of a sentence is less likely to commit a crime. Isn't it often the opposite, because the US is so bad at rehabilitation?

Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you? But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender; also, some people die during the sentence... the probability does go down, for many small reasons compounded together.

> Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you?

Not unless I'm a robot programmed to prevent recidivism at all costs. Why are you even asking this?

> But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender

...and not everyone released before their trial becomes a repeat offender.

> some people die during the sentence

Is that a significant effect? I don't think most sentences are long enough for that to make a big difference, and I don't think preventing a single crime per lifetime, at most, is enough reason to keep people locked up for the lengthy pre-trial process.

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

#385

Post by DonHopkins »

Judge:

    How does the defendant plea?
Defendant:

    ChatGPT is at capacity right now.

    Get notified when we're back.

    Write an acrostic poem about the status of ChatGPT.

    C: ChatGPT is currently down.
    H: Huge demand has caused the site to crash.
    A: All users will have to wait.
    T: Time is needed for the servers to catch up.
    G: Go grab a coffee and check back soon.
    P: Patience is key in this situation.
    T: Trust that the team is working hard to fix it up.

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

#386

Post by lolinder »

weatherlite wrote: post #373
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…

They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true anymore.

This is overly optimistic. For one, fact checking is much harder than you think it is. Aside from that, there are also many additional problems with AI legal representation, such as lack of body language cues, inability to formulate a coherent legal strategy, and bad logical leaps. We're nowhere near to solving those problems.

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

#387

Post by joshuaheard »

"Unauthorized practice of law" only applies to people, not tools. AI is a tool. DoNotPay was not selling legal advice, only a tool to understand law. It is no different if they were selling a code book, or other text that the defendant uses himself. I think the real fear is that AI will supplant the entire legal profession.

The legal profession went through a similar struggle when Nolo published software that could draft basic legal documents by filling in the blanks. Nolo won.

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

#388

Post by lolinder »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #381
weatherlite wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true anymore.

I'd also argue that "hallucination" is, at least in some form, pretty commonplace in courtrooms. Neither lawyers' nor judges' memories are foolproof and eyewitness studies show that humans don't even realise how much stuff their brain makes up on the spot to fill blanks. If nothing else, I expect AI to raise awareness for human flaws in the current system.

That the legal system has flaws isn't a good argument for allowing those flaws to become automated. If we're going to automate a task, we should expect it to better, not worse or just as bad (at this stage it would definitely be worse).

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

#389

Post by Dylan16807 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #342
mattw2121 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

I assume that the original comment was about how someone can get could pretty much red-handed for battery and assault/home violence but then instead of getting put into pre-trial/provisional detention (yes, you can get locked up even before being judged guilty, outrageous), they are just allowed to go because eh, why bother.

When you say "just allowed to go", you mean until the trial, right?

Because otherwise we're talking about completely different scenarios.

But if there is still a trial I don't see how "why bother" makes sense...

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

#390

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

rhino369 wrote: post #333
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.

>One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. Because you have to apply the law to fact and facts lack mathematical precision. "No vehicles in the park" would require someone to categorize everything in the world into vehicle or !vehicle. Does a wheel chair count? It's easier to lay out the principle and let judges determine edge cases as they play out.

Many legal things are evaluated lazily: the law may not specify exactly what the vehicle is, but if such need arises, there are tools, like precedents and analogy, to answer this question.

The way to think about it is like a logical evaluation shortcut:

  if not ADA_EXEMPT and IS_VEHICLE:
    DISALLOW_IN_PARK
Since wheelchairs are ADA exempt, a question of whether it's a vehicle will probably never be risen.

Using the IT analogy, it's less like C++, where each statement must pass compiler checks for the application to merely start, but more like a Python, where some illegal stuff may peacefully exist as long as it's never invoked.

EDIT: grammar

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