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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

#571
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.

My point was not about necessary ambiguity where precision is not attainable. It was about todays inability of the legal professions to write concise conditions within contracts or laws.

E.g. as someone else said in this threat, there is useful ambiguity in requirements like: „within reasonable time“. But if you are enumerating a bunch of things and their relationships, ambiguity is often not what you want, but what you get without some clear syntax.

In my experience it’s not uncommon to stumble upon legal texts like „a, b and c or d then …“. But what does that mean? Is this supposed to be „(a && b && c) || d“ or „(a && b) && (c || d)“? That’s stuff that could easily be clarified at times of writing by just using parenthesis. Or maybe using actual lists with one item per line instead of stupid csv embedded in your sentences.

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

#572
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the book was written about a particular case, that seems like specific legal advice. If the book was a generalized "choose your own adventure" where you compose a sensible legal argument from selecting a particular template and filling it in with relevant data - use of the book essentially lets the user find the pre-existing legal advice that is relevant to their situation. Chatbots as a system are arguably a lot…

Are you still referring to the scenario from the article, or a different one where it's a resource you use outside of court?

> Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker.

Also, probably wouldn't matter. The interactive human-ish-like nature might cross the line to being considered as counsel, even if you said it wasn't. See my response to your other comment.

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

#573

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 you make a ridiculous argument using confabulated case law as a lawyer, you can be subject to discipline by the state bar and even lose your law license. The legal system's time and attention is not free and unlimited and that's why you need a license to practice law. The judges and so forth don't want to deal with a bunch of people talking nonsense. Who is the lawyer who is putting their reputation on the line for the AI's argument? The people doing this want to say nobody is at fault for the obviously bogus arguments it's going to spout. That's why it's unacceptable.

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

#574

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…

Ironically, I recently saw a convo on Twitter where someone was showing off a ChatGPT generated legal argument, and, it had done exactly that, hallucinated a case to cite.

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

#575

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…

> 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. > Defendant (as dictated by AI): Yes, you are right, there was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978.

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

#576

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…

Yes it's true that LLMs hallucinate facts, but there are ways to control that. Despite the challenges they can spit out perfectly functional code to spec to boot. So for me it's not too much of a stretch to think that it'd do a reasonably good job at defending simple cases.

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

#577

As the Opening Arguments podcast (one of the two hosts is a lawyer) said: If as a lawyer you do what was asked - just parrot what an AI tells you to parrot, you're going to get sanctioned and possibly disbarred. As a lawyer you are responsible for what you say and argue, and if you argue something that you know to be false, you're in violation of the ethics standards; just about every bar association lists that as sa…

> So far __ChatGPT got it wrong every time__. The first wave of ChatGPT stories were all "amazing, wonderful, humanity is basically obsolete". But now that people have had a little time, I'm seeing a ton of examples where people are realizing that ChatGPT sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but actually doesn't know anything. We know that humans are easily fooled by glib confidence; we can all think of poli…

ChatGPT does some really impressive stuff! As a creative tool or a code generator it can give you some good material to work with.

But the hype has been insane, totally untethered from reality. I think it's the instinct to assume that something which can mimic human speech quite well must also have some mechanism for comprehending the meaning of the words it's generating, when it really doesn't.

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

#578
post #551

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.

You're ignoring the fact that ChatGPT isn't trained to be correct or logical, it's trained to be semantically understandable and coherent. Which is an absolutely terrible model to rely on in a court room.

I know which is probably why this was a proof of concept with what would have been abysmal results.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!" My point was that I think I do understand what the system does, and what it does is (largely) provide lots of work for people in the leg…

>> I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here > Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!" No, I'm suggesting that complexity may often have good reason. Without specific reform proposals, what you're saying registers simil…

>Without specific reform proposals

I think requiring me to write a policy paper in HN comments is a bit onerous. In any event, I can't much help if my mild criticism is interpreted on your part as something deeply nefarious.

>Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make that service unnecessary.

The fact that a service exists does not make that service necessary. Or do you always buy the protection plan from Office Depot when you purchase a stapler? Anyway, I agree that the mortgage companies find great value in all of their various fees.

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

#580
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the book was written about a particular case, that seems like specific legal advice. If the book was a generalized "choose your own adventure" where you compose a sensible legal argument from selecting a particular template and filling it in with relevant data - use of the book essentially lets the user find the pre-existing legal advice that is relevant to their situation. Chatbots as a system are arguably a lot…

Are you still referring to the scenario from the article, or a different one where it's a resource you use outside of court? > Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. Also, probably wouldn't matter. The interactive human-ish-like nature might cross the l…

Right, this strikes me as exactly the kind of "I'm not touching you!" argument that basically never works in a court of law. The law's not like code. "Well it's not any different than publishing a book, so this is just free speech and not legal representation"; "OK, cool, well, we both know that's sophist bullshit, judgement against you, next case."
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