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

Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 212 posts

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#131

Post by Buttons840 »

hospitalhusband wrote: post #125
jiggawatts wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT 3.5 or GPT 4? Almost every negative comment about LLMs is by someone using an older, weaker model and making generalisations. Here’s GPT 4 giving me a riddle: https://chat.openai.com/share/1753ce5a-d44d-44ac-bc97-599a26...

> But was it GPT4 I keep seeing this cop-out, which ignores that it's fundamentally the same architecture, and has the same flaws. More wallpaper to hide the cracks better makes it an even worse tool for these use cases because all it does is fool more people into thinking it has capabilities that it fundamentally doesn't.

I don't think this is a fair argument. If we compare a GPT4 architecture with 5,000 parameters and a GPT4 architecture with 1 trillion parameters, should we judge the capabilities of both by the 5,000 parameter version, because they're both the same architecture?

There is more than architecture that can set them apart as well. GPT4 may have been trained by a slightly different algorithm, or on different data, and this can result in fundamentally different results.

Most of these conversations are not focused on one specific version, but are about the capabilities of LLMs in general, and it is implied we are talking about state-of-the-art LLMs, and GPT3 is no longer state-of-the-art.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#132

Post by danielmarkbruce »

hospitalhusband wrote: post #125
jiggawatts wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT 3.5 or GPT 4? Almost every negative comment about LLMs is by someone using an older, weaker model and making generalisations. Here’s GPT 4 giving me a riddle: https://chat.openai.com/share/1753ce5a-d44d-44ac-bc97-599a26...

> But was it GPT4 I keep seeing this cop-out, which ignores that it's fundamentally the same architecture, and has the same flaws. More wallpaper to hide the cracks better makes it an even worse tool for these use cases because all it does is fool more people into thinking it has capabilities that it fundamentally doesn't.

This is nonsense. It's not a cop-out to say "use the latest, most capable model before complaining". Anyone remotely close to this field knows model size matters, amount of training data matters, quality of training data matters, and several other variables matter. Even if someone knows zero about it, just using 3.5 v 4 is enough to see they are two different things. Like a lizard v a human.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#133

Post by codeflo »

lamontcg wrote: post #99
lynx23 wrote: post #24

Wait, this is handled as "ChatGPT made up these cases" and not as "Layers deliberately used ChatGPT to fabricate stuff"? Is anyone really believing a lawyer is that stupid? I know, adssume good intentions and all, but in this case, really?

> Is anyone really believing a lawyer is that stupid? There's over a million lawyers in the United States. You'd expect at least one of them to be a 1-in-a-million level of bad, or 4.7 standard deviations below the mean assuming a Gaussian distribution of competency. An average person would normally never come across that lawyer in their lifetime, but media will find that lawyer and amplify their mistakes to everyone…

There's no reason to believe it's a Gaussian distribution around the mean. Given that there are admission tests, you'd rather hope it's only the tail end of a Gaussian distribution, with the cutoff being what's required to pass the bar.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#134

Post by Conscat »

toyg wrote: post #85
boringg wrote: post #5

Disbarred?

Actually, I think he shouldn't be - if suitably scared and scarred, the guy will likely stay away from anything resembling AI/ML for the rest of his life. Unlike language models, humans really do learn.

This lawyer does not read news, and he is not skeptical of overhyped technology. He might learn to be wary of AI now, but the underlying issue, this appalling lack of critical thinking skill, isn't likely to change.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#135

Post by Buttons840 »

pshc wrote: post #53
cj wrote: post #19

I asked ChatGPT to tell me a riddle. It was “What is always hungry, needs to be fed, and makes your hands red?” (Or something like that) I asked for a hint about 5 times and it kept giving more legitimate sounding hints. Finally I gave up and asked for the answer to the riddle, and it spit out a random fruit which made no sense as the answer to the riddle. I then repeated the riddle and asked ChatGPT what the answer…

I think part of this is because GPT doesn’t have any “hidden variable” storage and doesn’t get any prep time up front to come up with something coherent. Just completes the next token based on the previous context.

You can give it prep time, tell it to reason out loud and it will write a paragraph (or two) about what it is thinking--or rather, the paragraph is its "thinking".

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#136

Post by icelancer »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #106
cj wrote: post #19

I asked ChatGPT to tell me a riddle. It was “What is always hungry, needs to be fed, and makes your hands red?” (Or something like that) I asked for a hint about 5 times and it kept giving more legitimate sounding hints. Finally I gave up and asked for the answer to the riddle, and it spit out a random fruit which made no sense as the answer to the riddle. I then repeated the riddle and asked ChatGPT what the answer…

I need to know what version of ChatGPT you were using, because this is a critical piece of information that everyone just blatantly ignores, and I can only imagine that it's out of ignorance of the significance of the difference. This is what happened when I asked ChatGPT 4... ME Give me hints without outright telling me the answer to the riddle: "What is always hungry, needs to be fed, and makes your hands red?" Cha…

When the answer is something ridiculous or stupid, it's 95%+ of the time GPT-3.5-turbo and is rarely disclosed by the other party. GPT-4 is an order of magnitude better, if not two orders of magnitude better.

It's hard to tell if the party crapping on ChatGPT is doing so out of ignorance or malice.

Finetuning with GPT-4 can't come soon enough...

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#137

Post by bentcorner »

anigbrowl wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do that you first need to distrust AI, and a lot of people don't. They think of GPT like Google-but-written-in-English. That is a large part of the problem.

That's not a valid excuse, though. Lawyers are paid big bucks to think , not to assume . Otherwise you could do your litigation for free by just asking interested people on Twitter. I went to law school and had to drop out due to an injury & attendant medical costs; it's a crime (as in going to jail) for me to practice law without being licensed, no matter how good my work product might be.

There are probably thousands of lawyers that thought about using ChatGPT for their profession, most of them realized it lies and never got farther than that, maybe a few hundred actually tried it out and also realized ChatGPT was lying, this is the one guy managed to swiss-cheese-model his way through.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#138

Post by hluska »

dylan604 wrote: post #111
inopinatus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grinding against the safety rails on a mountain hairpin is not indicative of a competent driver.

no, but that driver might just be that much more successful if they get away with it. in fact, while not a mountain hairpin as your example, there was a recent race car driver that did a similar thing by intentionally using the wall as a push back to allow a maneuver that allowed for success. so a clever comment attempting to prove a point is not always indicative of a proven point ;-)

No, but a winky smile after an intentionally inflammatory reply is usually indicative of someone I’m not interested in reading again. Doubly so when they refuse to use capital letters.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#139

Post by tialaramex »

cj wrote: post #19

I asked ChatGPT to tell me a riddle. It was “What is always hungry, needs to be fed, and makes your hands red?” (Or something like that) I asked for a hint about 5 times and it kept giving more legitimate sounding hints. Finally I gave up and asked for the answer to the riddle, and it spit out a random fruit which made no sense as the answer to the riddle. I then repeated the riddle and asked ChatGPT what the answer…

A colleague tried 20 questions with ChatGPT and the answer they'd chosen was "Margaret Thatcher" (UK Prime Minister, the "Iron Lady")

ChatGPT got as far as basically narrowing it down to post-War UK Prime Ministers, which is fairly impressive although it only had a few questions left. Then though it decided the answer must be "Winston Churchill". Churchill isn't meaningfully a post-War PM. He lost the July 1945 General Election, which was before the Pacific victory.

It did guess Maggie, with nothing left, at a point where I don't think it had ruled out Blair, Cameron or Heath, let alone say, Liz Truss, but guessing Churchill first shows the limitations of such a model.

Re: Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

#140

Post by Izkata »

lynx23 wrote: post #24

Wait, this is handled as "ChatGPT made up these cases" and not as "Layers deliberately used ChatGPT to fabricate stuff"? Is anyone really believing a lawyer is that stupid? I know, adssume good intentions and all, but in this case, really?

With how management has been talking about "AI" over here, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.

I think non-technical people, lawyers included, are being duped into thinking the true singularity-level AI revolution just happened.

Post reply on HN