491–500 of 708 posts
Ironically, the outcome of this whole saga is the most lawyer outcome it could've been... by way of Lawyers advocating to keep legal protection out of reach from the common man and inserting themselves between real innovation and progress for financial gain.
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.
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It does. Licensing has nothing to do with your credentials past having them. The state bar doesn't care which lawschool you went to, your LSAT score, your GPA, etc.
"It does" How? "Licensing has nothing to do with your credentials past having them." The way that most credentialing is used for employment.
If you are being sued in a court, aren't allowed to defend yourself? Can't you act like your own lawyer? Then what's the problem in using an AI?
In other words, you being a mouthpiece for an AI would likely be seen as sufficiently separate enough from "representing yourself" as to be not representing yourself at all.
I would imagine, in SCOTUS, were a case argued around allowing folks to "represent themselves" like this, one of the first questions a justice would ask is "Suppose, instead of an AI computer talking through the defendant, an actual practicing lawyer was talking through the defendant through the earpiece. In that case, is the person still actually representing themselves?"
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>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 a…
That's how common law and precedents work in the US system. Case A from 1924 said cars were vehicles, but bikes weren't. Case B from 1965 said e-bikes weren't vehicles. Case C said motorcycles were vehicles. And then the judge analogizes the facts and find that an electric motorcycle is a vehicle so long as its not a e-bike.
But the administrative law side of things works the opposite. They publish a regulation just saying "e-bikes above a certain weight qualify as vehicles under Law X."
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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.
I don't like that they're testing this out live. Do what you'd have to do if this were say a medical device: hire a retired judge or two and set up double-blind fake trials with AI or human representation. Prove it works, then try it with real people.
Compared to Tesla testing FSD on roads, I don't think this is unsafe/ harming anyone involved.
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Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation, and their formulaic nature justified and equally formulaic response, or something to that effect. Whether the LLM was actually going to output answers directly, or just be used to drive a behavior tree or something like that, is a question…
It had to be shot down harshly because there are some premises to a courtroom proceeding that aren't met by an AI as we currently have. One of those is that the lawyer arguing a case is properly credentialed and has been admitted to the bar, and is a professional subject to malpractice standards, who can be held responsible for their performance. An AI spitting out statistically likely responses can't be considered a…
IANAL, but I would bet the level of effort to fact check an AI's output would be orders of magnitude lower than researching and building all your own facts.
I used it to generate some ffmpeg commands. I had to verify all the flags myself, but it was like 5 minutes of work compared to probably hours it would have taken me to figure them all out on my own.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/ind...
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…
Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation, and their formulaic nature justified and equally formulaic response, or something to that effect. Whether the LLM was actually going to output answers directly, or just be used to drive a behavior tree or something like that, is a question…
I have some past experience working in the courts in my state, and I know there are many judges who are perfectly fine with dismissing minor traffic infractions for no reason other than that they feel like it. If you've got an otherwise clean traffic abstract and sent in a reasonable sounding letter contesting the infraction, these judges probably aren't going to thoroughly read through every word of it and contrast it with what was alleged in the citation. They don't really care about the city making an extra $173 off your parking ticket -- they just want to get through their citation reviews before lunch. Case dismissed.
So I am not surprised at all by the success of DoNotPay for minor traffic infractions. Most traffic courts are heavily strained by heavy case loads. If you give them a reason to throw your case out so they can go home on time, by all means, they will take it.