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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

#661

Post by shubb »

freejazz wrote: post #445
shubb wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this just open the question of whether the chatbot can get a JD? The other angle is whether the chatbot can be equivalent to a process which a proper person can rubber stamp. For instance, a professional engineer might run a pre-written structural engineering model against their building design and certify that the building was sound - and then stand up in court and say they had followed standard process. It…

The difference is the engineer is liable... how is an AI going to be liable. What is the point of holding an AI liable? If the company is going to be liable on behalf of the AI, what do you think is going to happen? They aren't going to provide the service...

Well, if an engineer builds a bridge and it falls down because the industry standard software they are using had a bug, I imagine the settlement would be paid by their insurance who would in turn sue the software vendor.

In your world X-Ray machine fries your leg and the manufacturer doesn't get sued. Of course the vendor gets sued.

This is why open source licences usually have some terms disclaiming responsibility. If you use them, its your fault.

Now, if a hospital buys an XRay machine with that disclaimer, they are going to carry the payout. And if the machine doesn't have a disclaimer like that but the manufacturer has gone bust, the hospital is going to regret not doing normal procurement checks for vendor solvency.

But in this case - people self represent in court all the time based on bad information from youtube. I'm sure in future they'll type "write an argument for my case" into GPT before the trial and read it out. How is this different?

I'm uncomfortable because this feels like... the accused brings a law book to court and is told that "that book doesn't have a JD". The fact we are asking for a software to have a human qualification is wierd.

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

#662

Post by mountainb »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #562
jamesdwilson wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is never pulling from a source, then why is it able to provide citations? check the chat bot on you.com: https://you.com/search?q=list%20top%205%20best%20selling%20c...

The example you give isn't necessarily a valid one. You're asking for a specific piece of knowable, measurable data -- one that has a single right answer and many wrong answers. Legal questions may have conflicting answers, they may have answers that are correct in one venue but not in another, etc., I have't yet seen any examples of an AI drawing the distinctions necessary for those situations.

ChatGPT has a lot of trouble understanding jurisdiction and what constitutes controlling precedent over what in which jurisdictions. As in it has no conception of it at all and gets it really badly mixed up. It doesn't understand the hierarchy of any court system so there are some questions that it will just always get wrong.

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

#663

Post by rafaelero »

dragonwriter wrote: post #589
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…

> 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 witnes…

A traffic ticket is hardly a catastrophy.

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

#664

Post by lern_too_spel »

tahoeskibum wrote: post #499

But then again, Chat GPT just passed law school exams, albeit at C+ in blind testing. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/ind...

You're not going to get a white shoe law firm partner to come to court to contest your parking ticket unless you are that lawyer yourself, so barely passing is good enough. The only thing to worry about is if the exam grading doesn't allow negative marks for disbarment-level answers, that barely passing score might not be giving us enough information.

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

#665

Post by joshka »

rhino369 wrote: post #360
joshka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, reference the same issues with legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice. It's not…

>It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary bits though. I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better API…

Generally to get the most utility from ChatGPT, you need to feed in a bunch of context. E.g. for legal stuff, feed in each relevant case, the facts of your own case, perhaps an example pleading or two to show the general format you want and then ask it to produce what you're looking for.

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

#666

Post by DangitBobby »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #407
DangitBobby wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why we allow them to prevent that?

privacy for the accused who are considered innocent until the verdict is read is one reason.

I really doubt that's why. Court proceedings are a matter of public record. You can just buy magazines full of names and mugshots of people who gave been arrested. I want recordings to keep power hungry judges in check.

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

#667

Post by rvz »

Barrin92 wrote: post #22

Absolutely atrocious stunt on the part of that company. A glorified chatbot is not itself legally accountable or trained lawyer and it cannot seriously represent anyone. I assume the entire purpose of this was to bait the obvious shutdown and then complain on the internet about the legacy lawyers or whatever to generate press. Reminds me of the 'sentient AI' Google guy. Is this going to be the new grift in the indust…

> Is this going to be the new grift in the industry?

It already is a new grift. The same AI snake oil scam to be another VC exit scam to the next sucker. DoNotPay is just one of the many AI scams.

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

#668

Post by freejazz »

shubb wrote: post #661
freejazz wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the engineer is liable... how is an AI going to be liable. What is the point of holding an AI liable? If the company is going to be liable on behalf of the AI, what do you think is going to happen? They aren't going to provide the service...

Well, if an engineer builds a bridge and it falls down because the industry standard software they are using had a bug, I imagine the settlement would be paid by their insurance who would in turn sue the software vendor. In your world X-Ray machine fries your leg and the manufacturer doesn't get sued. Of course the vendor gets sued. This is why open source licences usually have some terms disclaiming responsibility.…

When you self represent you implicitly cannot sue for malpractice. The AI bot isn't self representation, it's representation in everything but name and liability which the explicitly disclaim. You can characterize it however you want but its just facially the unlicensed practice of law. If someone wants to ask ChatGPT legal questions and dig their own grave, that's entirely difference from a business that purports to offer legal advice but just disclaims any responsibility therefrom. Frankly, I don't know what's so confusing about that to you.

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

#669

Post by db48x »

bloak wrote: post #104
db48x wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what he said. The key word there was _operate_, not _use a band–aid_. I wouldn’t recommend trying to take out your own appendix; it’s a really bad idea.

On the other hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov (If it had been filmed, the video would probably be on YouTube with Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" as the soundtrack.)

Yea, but he was already a professional practicing surgeon! The rest of us should not attempt this; we should hire a professional. It is similarly preferable to hire the services of a professional lawyer most of the time.

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

#670

Post by dragonwriter »

iinnPP wrote: post #88
madsbuch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Denmark there is "fri process" that will ensure a lawyer is provided when really needed and you can't afford it – my guess is that other countries have similar systems.

The problem is that, most of the time, those lawyers are so loaded with cases that they cannot provide you full representation. Ask any US Federal DA or US Federal Public Defender who you know to be honest. Any. It may differ in your country, but it is unlikely.

> Ask any US Federal DA

There is no such thing as a “US Federal DA”.

I assume you mean a US Attorney. OTOH, US Attorneys and Federal Public Defenders (in the judicial districts that have them, its a district by district decision under the governing law) may not be the most knowledgeablr about this since most cases are tried in state court and the federal indigent defense delivery system is very different from most state systems, both in structural model and caseload.

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