Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 708 posts

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

#641

Post by crabmusket »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #532
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…

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.

Is this not what moot court is? Seems like a great place to test and refine this kind of technology. The same place lawyers in training are tested and refined.

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

#642

Post by Spivak »

akira2501 wrote: post #600
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…

Do you imagine that a pro se litigant is going to have a hard time or will be required to spend small fortunes to defend themselves in "fucking traffic court?" You're basically trying to cut the argument both ways. Administrative courts are not criminal courts, and an AI would never be allowed near a criminal defense trial for obvious reasons.

Yes because a lawyer costs their hourly rate whether it’s traffic or criminal court. Or more generally as an economy wide trend — paying a human to do something is often the most expensive route you can take.

We’re talking about traffic tickets that are usually in the hundred dollar range. If anyone is going to court rather than just paying it, it’s because $100 is a non-trivial amount of money to them.

It doesn’t have to be AI lawyers but any change to the system that reduces the total amount of work needed to be done by humans is a win.

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

#644

Post by eaurouge »

rideontime wrote: post #615
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.

He seems to have shut down a lot of his startup's services due to the attention he's been getting: https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648

No, the service doesn’t work. It’s just marketing and PR.

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

#645

Post by dragonwriter »

intrasight wrote: post #542
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…

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…

> Now the question is this. If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one sanction an AI?

Its not and you don’t.

When a legal person (either a natural person or corporation) is doing something illegal like unauthorized practice of law, you sanction that person. The fact that they use an AI as a key tool in their unauthorized law practice is not particularly significant, legally.

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

#646

Post by refactor_master »

danShumway wrote: post #546
Forgeties79 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Run it multiple times with multiple defendants, set up a control group

And also

> That would be a lot more work, but it would also be much higher quality data

I don’t know much about the field of law, but anecdotally it doesn’t strike me as particularly data driven. So I think, even before introducing any kind of AI, the above would be met with a healthy dose of gatekeeping.

Like the whole sport of referencing prior rulings, based on opinions at a point in time doesn’t seem much different than anecdotes to me.

But I’d love to be proven wrong though.

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

#647

Post by gamblor956 »

freedomben wrote: post #549
gamblor956 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would lose that bet. Fact-checking nonsensical output would take a lot longer than researching a single body of law, which you can generally do by just looking up a recent case on the matter. You don't need to check every cite; that will have been done for you by the lawyers and judges involved in that case. But checking every cite in an AI's output: many of those citations won't exist, and for the ones that do,…

> You don't need to check every cite; that will have been done for you by the lawyers and judges involved in that case. Why would this be different with an AI assistant to help you? It's not a binary "do or do not". Just because you have an assistant doesn't mean you don't do anything. Kind of like driver assist can handle some of the load vs full self-driving. > But checking every cite in an AI's output: many of tho…

But you'd have to do this anyway if you did all the research yourself. At least the AI assistant can help give you some good leads so you don't have to start from scratch.

No, that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. If you did the research yourself, you wouldn't need to verify every cite once you find a relevant source/cite, because previous lawyers would have already validated the citations contained within that source. (A good lawyer should validate at least some of those cites, but frequently that's not necessary unless you're dealing with big stakes.)

And the AI assistant, at least this one and the ones based on ChatGPT, don't provide good leads. They provide crap leads that not only don't exist, but increase the amount of work. And any "AI" based on LLM will never be capable of providing good cites, because they'll never understand what they're reading and/or citing, and they'll miss relevant citations that are not statistically likely (i.e., new case law, or cases with similar facts, or similar law, or otherwise similar contexts that can be applied to the case at hand) that a context-aware AI or living breathing human would find easily.

At best, LLM-based AI might be able to help people with very simple legal situations. But you don't need AI for that. A single decision tree is easier to implement, and it's even easier to verify the domain-specific process and outcomes to make sure you don't get something silly like happened with this "AI".

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

#648

Post by geraneum »

intrasight wrote: post #627
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…

>absolute precision is required LOL - you gotta be kidding. In software, we strive for that - by running tests. In the law, there are no tests. Not saying that absolute precision isn't required. I know lots of cases were an extra comma, a wrong date, or a signature from the wrong person has cost someone tens of millions of dollars. I would argue that AI-based tools could prevent such HUMAN mistakes.

> I would argue that AI-based tools could prevent such HUMAN mistakes.

Still you won’t find a useful/sober lawyer who would argue a case in front of a judge based on a made up precedent which never existed in reality.

Making a mistake as you put it, in humans, is quite different than “hallucinations” of an LLM. The practical AI tool that is good for preventing such human mistakes (precisely) doesn’t exist _yet_.

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

#649

Post by fatbird »

john_the_writer wrote: post #628
fatbird wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand the "cites a non-existent precedent" bit. Presumably the AI would have a database of a pile of precedent. It wouldn't make up cites. It would have "knowledge" of so much precedence, it could likely find something to win either side of the argument.

I think you're misunderstanding how the model works. It predicts next tokens based on past tokens and the LLM trained on large bodies of text. It doesn't have an underlying database of "factual" elements it incorporates or searches, and its output doesn't have an underlying semantic structure that can be verified or reasoned about. The entirety of the quality of its output can only be judged by whether it "sounds" like the rest of the text on which it was trained.

I think making the connection between the predictive output and an underlying representation of reality is the next great step, but until that happens, chatGPT's output is just amazing mimicry of human language.

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

#650

Post by fatbird »

dragonwriter wrote: post #638
john_the_writer wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "finding"? The AI would just return links or raw text of the cases. Reading the findings would be the same as reading any precedence. But the AI could weight the results, and you'd only have to read the high scoring results. If the AI got it wrong, you'd just refine the search and the AI would be trained. To the cost. If it removed the need for one legal assistant or associate then anything less than…

You can't validate that it is making the right citations by only checking the cases it is citing, and the rankings it provides of those and other cases. You have to validate the non-existence of other, particularly contrary, cases it should be citing either additionally or instead, which it may or may not have ranked as relevant.

This is a very important point that highlights the absence of anything we could call "understanding".
Post reply on HN