551–560 of 708 posts
Lawyer Bar Associations trying their best to starve off the inevitable. If only ChatGPT was trained with case law and law school texts. Then when they sue, the ChatGPT model can defend itself. I'm affected by this too, but watching lawyers be rendered obsolete makes me very excited.
Good. Totally fine with trying to use AI to give legal advice, but it should be done with a lawyer’s license on the line. A company that explicitly disclaims being a law firm and states is not giving legal advice should also not get to tweet that they are “representing” someone in court. A good bar (pun intended) for the quality of the tech is if it is good enough that a licensed attorney trusts it to give legal advi…
No, bad. I may also disagree with some of the tactics DoNotPay used to represent themselves. But in a larger sense Lawyers cost money a lot of money. it's wonderful living in a time where the cost of filing suits is so low compared to defending against said suits. AI lawyers can help lower those barriers to entry. the court in question is fucking traffic court. please lower the barrier to entry for defense and allow…
For traffic court, perhaps, but these AI tools don’t seem guaranteed to not make this problem worse at broader scales.
These AIs will also be available to large firms, who are equally incentivized to use AI for augmenting argumentation through existing lawyers, but will also be incentivized to train their own walled garden powerful models in a way that poorer clients still would likely not have access to, and which individuals and smaller firms will not have the resources to train themselves.
These kinds of AI models could very easily serve to entrench and raise the cost of a defense by making it so you not only need a lawyer, you need a lawyer-backed-by-a-firm-with-a-LLM to be competitive at trial - making all existing problems even worse.
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> 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…
From what I've read recently, the legal profession is the one most at risk of adverse financial effects from AI. Not the court appearances nor the specialized work. But the run-of-the-mill boilerplate legal writing that is the bread and butter profit center of most first. You bet they are threatened and will push back. Now the question is this. If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one san…
I'd prefer that the boilerplate actually be reduced instead, but... I don't have any issue with someone using AI to target tasks that are essentially copy-paste operations anyway. I think this was kind of different.
> If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one sanction an AI?
IANAL, but AIs don't have legal personhood, so it would be kind of like trying to sanction a hammer. I don't think that the AI was being threatened with legal action over this stunt, DoNotPay was being threatened.
In an instance where an AI just exists and is Open Source and there is no party at fault beyond the person who decides to download and use it, then as long as that person isn't violating court procedure there's probably no one to sanction? It's likely a bad move, but :shrug:.
But this comes into play with stuff like self-driving as well. The law doesn't think of AI as something that's special. If your AI drives you into the side of the wall, it's the same situation as if your back-up camera didn't beep and you backed into another car. Either the manufacturer is at fault because the tool failed, or you're at fault and you didn't have a reasonable expectation that the tool wouldn't fail or you used it improperly. Or maybe nobody's at fault because everyone (both you and the manufacturer) acted reasonably. In all of those cases, the AI doesn't have any more legal rights or masking of liability than your break pads do, it's not treated as a unique entity -- and using an AI doesn't change a manufacturer's liability around advertising.
That gets slightly more complicated with copyright law surrounding AIs, but even there, it's not that AIs are special entities that have their own legal status that can't own copyright, it's that (currently, we'll see if that precedent holds in the future) US courts rule that using an AI is not a sufficiently creative act to generate copyright protections.
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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"?
"Speech" would be like publishing a book about self-representation. "Counsel" would be providing advice to a defendant about their specific case. The machine would be in the courtroom advising the defendant on their trial, so that's counsel.
The HMCTS held a hackathon for the future tech in the UK court system a few years ago. The judges were people like the CEO of the courts, they also had lord chief justice. There were all sorts of firms like Linklaters, Pinsent Mason and Deloitte. We won with a simple Alexa lawyer that was to help poor rental tenants. It generated documents to send a landlord and possible legal advice. The idea was specifically for pe…
I'm interested. What sort of regulations do you think would affect the robo-lawyer space in the UK? Self-representation is frowned upon and mostly disallowed. Lawyers are expensive. I'd genuinely consider having ChatGPT fight for me.
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Thinking about how the problem would "elegantly solve itself" seems to illustrate the issue. Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a chance to fix it. A failure mode of jail time…
“Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court” That sounds like a horrible judge, maybe this AI can be used to sniff them out and get rid of them.
Another instance of the irreconcilable dichotomy of: "no one shall ignore the law" and "only lawyers can understand the law".
Only lawyers can give legal advice, big difference. You can represent yourself in court if you want to (generally, you don't) but if you want to offer that service to others, you need to be a licensed lawyer. It is the same for many professions.
I was saying that not knowing the law is not a defense yet the laws are so complex that an expensive expert that dedicated all their study to the law is practically (as in, yes, you have the option to not use a lawyer) required in court.
It is not the same for many profession. In no other profession are non-experts expected and required to know the matter.
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The official record taken word for word by the stenographer? Why would you need to challenge that? Are you implying something that's more than one in a million?
> Why would you need to challenge that? That's precisely the question, yes. > Are you implying something that's more than one in a million? Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
“I’ll see you in catch!”
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This was actually arguments for a speeding ticket in California. For those in the bay area with parking tickets.... I've had hundreds of parking tickets in California. I would always lose the first round of dispute, because it is adjudicated by the city/county that gets the revenue. The second level of dispute is reviewed by an independent party who actually looks at what you state and makes an impartial decision, an…
Are you a lawyer who deals with traffic law, or is California just some sort of dystopia where you get hundreds of parking tickets as a normal way of life? Up here in Ontario I've had 1 ticket in my life. I just... no, there is no way you're getting hundreds as an individual.
I wrote my story up here...
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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.
I'd have no objections at all to them setting up a fake test case with a real judge or real prosecutors and doing controlled experiments where there's no actual legal risk and where everyone knows it's not a real court case. You're right that it wouldn't be as attention-grabbing, but I suspect it would be a lot more useful for actually determining the AI's capabilities, with basically zero of the ethical downsides. I…