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

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made https://AskHN.ai What it does is not try to answer, but collect previous topics discussed by experts. Then answer the question based on the text, a far more reliable approach.

How does it qualify experts? I love the discussion here but if it turns to international nuclear strategy or the minutae of electrical networks (or presumably anything outside the regular wheelhouse) I notice that the quality goes down but the confidence stays the same.

Under the hood it builds and ranks the expertise of everyone in the network. That said, it doesn’t have knowledge outside the network, so if the network itself has low quality experts or no data, it’s going to give subpar results

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

#152
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 Gener…

Churchill was also prime minister from 1951-55.

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

#153

It turns out there were precedents: Case: Thompson v. Horizon Insurance Company, Filing: Plaintiff's Motion for Class Certification. Citation: The plaintiff's attorney cites the influential case of Johnson v. Horizon Insurance Company, 836 F.2d 123 (9th Cir. 1994), which established the standards for certifying class actions in insurance disputes. However, it has recently come to light that Johnson v. Horizon Insuran…

In any of those examples, when pointed out by the court that the cases do not seem to exist, did the attorney's then go and print out a fake case and file it with the court? That's what the atty here did. It's a bit further than what you list.

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

#154
post #28

I think the judge should not take into consideration anything about where the lawyer said they got the case information from. When you go to court and cite previous cases, you are responsible for ensuring they are real cases. If you can't do that, what exactly is your job as a lawyer?

>If you can't do that, what exactly is your job as a lawyer? to convince some (judge/jury) that your client is the one to win the trial. ethics are meant to be the definer of how far to go in that cause with licensing boards being the ultimate decider if you've crossed the line and are allowed to continue in the legal practice.

hmmm - I'll let you ponder what you think the licensing boards use to determine if you crossed the line if not for ethics....

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

#155
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?

The lawyer didn't use ChatGPT to purposefully fabricate cases, he just relied on GPT and assumed it wasn't lying.

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

#156
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a potential for a D&D DM with an LLM, but you'd need a lot of careful prompting and processing to handle the token limits today's models have. Simply put: a d&d game has more story and state than the 30,000-ish words an LLM can think about at once. I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities there.

I've also heard (here) that after you get 20-ish questions into an instance you start getting the really weird output. Some of the conjecture was because that's about how deep they trained. In any case, if that's true, that's a very short role playing session, unless there's a good way to retain info but reset the state that accrues and causes problems (if indeed that happens).

Yeah, but you could ask the LLM to do a few different things at each step.

You could provide it with the background, the story, the secrets, and the summary of everything that has happened so far- as well as what new things have taken place. Then ask it to re-write the summary of the story so far.

Separately, you could give it all that context and what the players have asked of it, and as what response to give.

As well, you could be recording all the events that have happened in a vector store, and do a search on it when players ask questions, and use those as context to the LLM when asking it what to reply.

There's lots of neat tricks we can use to help an LLM overcome it's limitations.

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

#157
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 gave playing 20Q with the GPT-4 version, and it did surprisingly well. It didn't quite get it in 20 questions, and correctly gave up once it hit that, but it was almost at my object (a computer power supply). Given what it was asking, I expect it would get it in one of two more questions. It's just one sample, but it asked the right questions to narrow the field to computer-related things, and then narrowed down to power-related things, with its final guess being a UPS.

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

#158
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…

Wow. That's kind of terrifying.

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

#159
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, learn how to say “I don’t know” This is the correct answer. It is like a sad salesman who is out of his depth, but decides to keep bullshiting!

Well, that tells you a lot about: 1. The people designing it (either optimists or looking for a quick exit). 2. The learning set they're using, which I believe is some kind of internet crawl of sorts? I imagine humanity, as a whole, bullshits its way through most of its life.

It makes sense that there wouldn't be a lot of training data that consists of people admitting they don't know - forums like stack overflow wouldn't even permit such a post/comment anyway. So presumably ChatGPT is very heavily weighted against giving "I don't know" as an answer when virtually all the examples of people asking questions in its training data are followed by plausible sounding answers.

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

#160
post #86
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…

Or, learn how to say “I don’t know” It can't. Correct me if I'm wrong - I probably am - but as a generative language model I was under the impression it has no actual understanding of the meaning of it's words, only the probability they work well together. You wouldnt expect dice to understand why you didn't want to roll snake eyes

It could if it had enough training data that demonstrated "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer to a question. The risk than is that it answers "I don't know" even when it is actually capable of providing a useful answer. In fact I've had it do that before too - not exactly "I don't know" but vague statements that aren't particularly helpful, when it turns out with the right prompt it "knew" exactly what the answer was.
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