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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

#531

Post by lostlogin »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #469
ajmurmann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is kind of an absurd example. The system is setup in such a way that such a person would be in enormous amounts of trouble even face criminal liability. They may not face a law called “practicing medicine without a license” but they would face negligent or other similarly severe charges. As well, the fact that this never, ever happens seems to indicate the current regulatory structure is enough for this.

The US really doesn’t have the concept of ‘scope of practice’?

That’s what’s being argued here and other systems have it. It seems an obvious thing.

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

#532

Post by Forgeties79 »

danShumway wrote: post #503
jchw wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely…

Yeah I feel like you're right on the money on re: the ethics of using someone who is in legal trouble who will have to live with the results. It's not as sexy but they should just build a fake case (or just use an already settled one if possible) and play out the scenario. No reason it wouldn't be just as effective as a "real" case.

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

#533

Post by rubylark »

asciimov wrote: post #336
renlo wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you believe licensure would solve?

It would help in having some sort of body that says, we want to have humans involved in the chain of responsibility when creating code and not willfully hand over the control to AI.

Would that not be the person running the AI? The one giving prompts and verifying that prompts are fulfilled adequately?

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

#534

Post by drdeca »

imoverclocked wrote: post #476
drdeca wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we could both give a vague description, and also a precise condition which is to be considered a sufficient but not necessary condition for the vague condition to be true? Such as “must signal within a reasonable time (signaling at least 300ft beforehand while not speeding is to be considered a sufficient condition for signaling within a reasonable time)” Downside: that could make laws even longer. Hm, what i…

That sounds like case law? Eg: It’s why we call “Roe v Wade” as we do.

What’s the difference between “precedent” and “case law”? I had thought that when I said “Though I guess that’s maybe kind of the sort of thing that precedent is for?” that that covered things like citing “Roe v. Wade”.

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

#535

Post by eloff »

weatherlite wrote: post #429
eloff wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re right here and it’s the same reason I see AI as a tool in the software profession. You can use it to speed up your work, but you have to have someone fully trained who can tell the difference between looks good but is wrong, versus is actually usable. I’ve been using copilot for half a year now and it’s helpful, but often wrong. I carefully verify anything it gives me before using it. I’ve had one bug…

> I’ve had one bug that made it to production where I think copilot inserted code that I didn’t notice and which slipped past code review I'm not saying this is good but come on. Humans do that all the time, why aren't we so harsh on humans? > I am not now, nor have I ever been afraid that AI is coming after my job I am. This thing amazed me, and even if it won't be able to 100% replace humans (which I doubt), it can…

I'm in the top x% of my profession, after 20 years of grinding. I'm unafraid. I don't see my salary taking a cut anytime soon. When I was searching for a job back in March, I had a 50% offer to response rate (if the company responded to my application.)

People who are just skating by may have cause for concern. But those are the people with the most to gain from it, so maybe not even them.

Demand is so high in the business, I have trouble imagining that any tool could make a meaningful impact on that.

It would need to multiply productivity by a huge number, and nothing has that impact. Copilot is barely, optimistically, above 10%. I don't really think I get that much, but just for arguments sake.

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

#536

Post by dmix »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #501

Honestly I think this guy was super clever. It was abundantly clear to anyone thinking about this that there was no way this ploy would work. But he got pretty big on Twitter, is getting all of this press, and has now built up awareness of his startup which is doing a far saner and less ambitious task incredible publicity which otherwise he would've had a hard time getting.

It's someone's gimmicky app idea that blew up into something way bigger than it was.

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

#537

Post by yamtaddle »

cwkoss wrote: post #527
marmetio wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific scenario doesn't matter. It's illegal to represent someone else in court if you're not a lawyer. There are a lot of things that you can't get a second chance at if your lawyer messes up that suing them can't fix. Lawyers and judges also negotiate, which a machine can't do because nobody feels an obligation to cut them some slack. Also now you're tainting case law with machine-generated garbage. Everythin…

If you can sell a book that helps teach someone how to represent themselves, why can't you sell a person access to a robot that helps teach them how to represent themselves? Why is the robot not "speech"?

Can a lawyer get away with doing the same thing if, say, they provide all their advice as .epub files? "Why, your honor, these were merely books..."

[EDIT] That is, would they be immune from e.g. malpractice if they did this so they "weren't representing" the defendant?

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

#538

Post by NikolaNovak »

BoorishBears wrote: post #449
NikolaNovak wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The programmer in me fumes at that imprecision. The human in me says "thank God". Because there a myriad valid times you cannot turn on signal 300ft before lane change, but you should always do it in reasonable time :) If I turn on a new street and there's a car parked 200ft down the lane or if a kid jumps on the road or if I become aware of an obstacle or a car cuts me off or I want to give somebody room at a…

> The human in me says "thank God". You're more charitable than me: I assume there will be infinitely more times where the imprecision is used for probable cause for a stop, than there will be times where someone was going to pull you over because you properly responded to a road hazard

Oh fair enough.

But I think there's a difference between "intent of change" and "abuse of change" / "threat surface of the change". Sometimes there's a clear, direct line between the two, but (and this is me being charitable:) I think a lot of the time there isn't. Which is to say, I don't think it's necessarily a contradiction that a) The law was changed to make things better/easier for people while b) In actual real world it can or will be abused a lot to make arbitrary trouble - the latter will depend a lot on place/politics/corruption/culture/societal norms/power balance/etc.

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

#539

Post by lolinder »

gfodor wrote: post #383
lolinder wrote: post #270

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…

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 ris…

No, if in a hypothetical future we have technology that is capable of reliably performing the role, I don't have a problem with it. This tech is explicitly founded on LLMs, which have major inherent weaknesses that make them unsuitable.

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

#540

Post by gamblor956 »

AI might one day take over the legal profession, but it won't be language-learning models that do it.

An AI that can replace lawyers would have to be able to make knowledge-based inferences, based on actually conceptually understanding what it is reading, and saying. They have to be able to identify the specific facts and circumstances that govern the matter at hand, not the general conditions that would normally apply, since cases are won on the specifics.

We're at least 2 decades away from that kind of AI, because AI research today is currently stuck in a local maxima of statistics-based brute force machine learning that doesn't actually lead to models that have any sort of intelligence about what they learn.

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