Earlier quoted context omitted.
A recent US president said about a large bill "we have to pass it just to see what's in it."
I'm unaware of a President saying that. Sounds more like the Nancy Pelosi (then House Minority Leader, subsequently Speaker of the House), talking about Obamacare: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...
An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
451–460 of 708 posts
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely can do. For instance, as I discovered recently going through this process myself - here in UK when applying for British citizenship you have to disclose any court orders against you. Now here's a thing - if you were given a ticket for speeding, accepted it and paid it then that's it, no harm done. If it's less than 3 tickets in the last 5 years then you don't even need to list it on the application form…
This only applies to a small group of people and that risk is known up front. If it's that important that they win they can not use this.
How is this known upfront? I've lived for over a decade in this country without knowing this, until I actually applied for my citizenship last year. I'm just lucky I never went to court to contest a speeding ticket(because I never got any) or I could have screwed myself over without even knowing.
Also define "small group" - nearly 200k people apply for British citizenship annually, and I bet most of them have no idea contesting a traffic ticket can cost them a chance at becoming citizens.
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Well it did what you asked him to do , you ordered it to write an essay about camels and their value in cybersecurity. It doesn't understand if you're joking or not or what the purpose of the whole thing. I asked it this: Are camels important to cyber security? Answer: "No, camels are not typically considered to be important for cyber security. Camels are domesticated mammals that are well-adapted to desert environme…
That’s preposterous. An intelligent agent, human, mineral, or otherwise, would respond that this is a ridiculous idea and ideally explain the reasons that such is the case. Imagine you are a student and you asked this amazing AI sone question of similar if mildly ridiculed and turn imagine the student didn’t already know the answer. Would you think this kind of response would be an example of an intelligent AI?
If it cannot deal with such things without being prompted in such a way that the prompter knows the answer already, how could it deal with complex legal situations with actually intelligent adversaries?
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#454Earlier 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.
No shot. It is not commonplace there that lawyers and judges are making ridiculous arguments or citing fictional case law.
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#455Absolute 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.
An example in the UK yesterday. Climate protesters glued themselves to a petrol tanker and were charged with tampering with a motor vehicle. The protesters argued that the bit with the petrol was a trailer, not a motor vehicle. The judge agreed and acquitted them. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64403074
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. 1. Laws are written or at least voted on by representatives, and they don't vote for things that they don't think they understand. Also, they're pretty regularly swapped out and often totally bonkers. Especially at the state level. 2. Things change. Look at how the right of search and seizure is applied to digital…
> they don't vote for things that they don't think they understand They don’t even read the things they vote on. They’re huge and it’d be a full time job.
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Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#457This is gonna be the funniest battle ever. AI is not gonna go away and it will be better at law than humans. I'll take any odds.
Same. Lawyers are screwed - they have been an insanely overpaid profession forever, this is going to be absolutely devastating for them. Also, there isn’t a whole lot of leverage in lawyering compared to the other professions that AI is poised to dominate, so it feels like lawyers in particular are going to have a hard time transforming themselves into a new profession that is symbiotic with AI systems. This is a cas…
You love to see it.
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#458Earlier 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…
> there is no license that stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery.
This isn’t the case everywhere. Where I am (New Zealand) each doctor has a scope of practice. You work within your scope. There may be conditions placed on a scope of practice too (eg supervision is required).
You can look up every doctor’s scope of practice and get a short summary of their training on the medical council website.
Other health professions follow a similar model.
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing." What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal. It's the unlicensed practice of law.
Alternative spin on the "know very well what they're doing": they know very well that it's unlicensed practice of law and they'd have to withdraw from the case.
But doing so generates lots of publicity for their online wizards that send out boilerplate legal letters.
The CEO tweeted about the system subpoenaing the traffic cop. If they actually built a system which is so advanced it can handle a court case in real time and yet so ignorant of the basics of fighting a traffic ticket it subpoenas the traffic cop it's... a very odd approach to product management for the flagship product of a legal specialist, and a bit scary to think anyone would use it. Easier to make the mistake of claiming your flagship system does stuff it shouldn't be doing if it's just vaporware and you haven't put too much thought into what it should do
Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
None of ADA_EXEMPT, IS_VEHICLE, or DISALLOW_IN_PARK can be easily formally defined. And the mere mention of "wheelchair" adds an additional ADA-related logic exemption. What about bicycles? Strollers? Unicycles? Shopping carts? Skateboards? And even if IS_VEHICLE was formally defined, that doesn't help, because the concept isn't reusable. It's perfectly normal for "No vehicles allowed in park" and "No vehicles allowe…
I don't know if I've misread some people here, but it's silly to insist that the law be a formal system. It's impossible. Common Law uses judicial precedent to fill in ambiguities as they turn into actual disputes. If you had to formally define everything, then a) it would run into the various Incompleteness Theorems in logic (like Goedel's) and the Principle of Explosion, so it would go hilariously wrong b) No law would ever get passed, as people would spend years trying and failing to recursively define every term.