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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

#581

Post by lolinder »

bostonsre wrote: post #567
lolinder wrote: post #246

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…

In the court itself there would definitely be no way to trust them right now, but I could see AI being a useful research tool for cases. It could find patterns and suggest cases for someone that is qualified to look further into. No idea how hard it is for lawyers to find relevant cases now, but seems like it could be a tough problem.

Yes, absolutely. As a senior software engineer, Copilot has been invaluable in helping me to do things faster. But having an expert human in the loop is key: someone has to know when the AI did it wrong.

What's so bad about this experiment isn't that they tried to use AI in law, it's that they tried to use AI without a knowledgeable human in the loop.

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

#582

Post by shrewduser »

tinsmith wrote: post #561
danShumway wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> they felt ... threatened I'm going to sit on that particular hill and see what happens. Even if DoNotPay's AI is not ready to do the job, the idea that AI could one day argue the law by focusing on logic and precedent instead of circumstance and interpretation is exceedingly threatening to a lawyer's career. No offense intended to the lawyers out there, of course. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel a bit fidgity over t…

i feel like lawyers will be able to legally keep AI out of their field for a while yet. they have the tools at their disposal to do so and a huge incentive.

other fields like journalism not so much.

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

#583

Post by asciimov »

rubylark wrote: post #533
asciimov wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I've learned anything, its people often never verify the correctness of anything automated.

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

#584

Post by [deleted] »

yamtaddle wrote: post #580
marmetio wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

[deleted]

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

#585

Post by dukeofdoom »

lolinder wrote: post #246

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…

That's hilarious, watch some of the trails on courtTV on youtube. The trials are are as culturally biased as you can get. And these ones are the ones we get to see. Judges are not some logical Spock! Free of influence, politics, and current group think. But people who think about their careers, public opinion and know who pays their paycheck. And these are the the competent ones. I remember judge Judy proclaiming "If it doesn't make sense, it's not true!!!", while screaming at some goy. This is pretty much the level of logic you can expect from a judge.

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

#586

Post by aardvarkr »

weatherlite wrote: post #401
aardvarkr wrote: post #382

Earlier 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…

A human would say that’s ridiculous and tell you why. Google would give you a link to Apache Camel. ChatGPT tells you about how great a camels humps are for data storage.

You tell me which system is intelligent.

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

#587

Post by samtp »

freitzkriesler wrote: post #578
samtp wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sentiment seems to be completely at odds with your first comment.

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

#588

Post by theLiminator »

skissane wrote: post #510
lolinder wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue I think is that it's pulling from too many sources. There are plenty of sources that are pretty machine readable that will give it good answers. There's a lot of training that can be eked out from the legal databases that already exist that could make it a lot better. If it takes in too much information from too many sources, it tends to get garbled. No, this is a common misunderstanding about the way the…

What if we prompt the LLM to generate a response with citations, and then we have program which looks up the citations in a citation database to validate their correctness? Responses with hallucinated citations are thrown away, and the LLM is asked to try again. Then, we could retrieve the text of the cited article, and get another LLM to opine on whether the article text supports the point it is being cited in favou…

Definitely, no one is arguing that an AI lawyer will be the near future, but I can totally see it being good enough for the vast majority of small scale lawsuits within 10-20 years.

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

#589

Post by dragonwriter »

jchw wrote: post #478
lolinder wrote: post #246

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…

> That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly

To avoid the catastrophy that makes it a catastrophically bad idea.

> I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response?

It had already worked badly (subpoenaeing the key adverse witness, who would provide a basically automatic defense win, and one of the most common wins for this kind of case, if they failed to show up.)

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

#590

Post by gunshai »

fardo wrote: post #552
gunshai wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Lawyers cost money a lot of money. AI lawyers can help lower those barriers to entry. 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…

>walled garden powerful models in a way that poorer clients still would likely not have access to

Even if that becomes the case, this is some how worse than what we have now?

>raise the cost of a defense

Highly doubtful

> you need a lawyer-backed-by-a-firm-with-a-LLM to be competitive at trial - making all existing problems even worse.

First, most things don't go to trial so you're completely missing the cost savings associated with avoiding trial because of these types of AI assisted scenarios.

Second, the cost associated with training models will go down. The cost of a Harvard law degree has ... never gone down.

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