Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nit : you probably mean Hanlon's razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Both would work in this case.
Which is usually the case tbh.
Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
111–120 of 180 posts
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#112Oh god, I suppose a part of the reason why those lawyers are well paid is because if something goes wrong then they're going to be responsible...
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#113This is interesting. How long untill someone gets sick because he/she was following what chatGPT told him/her to do? Medical advice? Political misinformation? How things will unfold this decade? Banning chatgpt from certain topics (medicine, law, etc...)? This decade will be really interesting indeed.
People did that with googling symptoms for a long time now
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#114>[to the judge on behalf of Schwartz] Mr. Schwartz, someone who barely does federal research, chose to use this new technology.
That’s a horrible excuse. I’m not a lawyer and don’t do caselaw research on any sort of regular basis but I have still poked around a bit when something strikes my interest. Compared to google they’re clunky and have poor matching, but I don’t remember it taking me more than half an hour or so to figure out which system would have the case I want and have to drill down to find it. ChatGPT was giving the the lawyer the (made up) case. It should really be a trivial task to find it in a caselaw database. Heck if I was the lawyer I would really really want to find the full text case! Who knows what broader context or additional nuggets of useful information it might have for my current client’s issue?
I would not be surprised if he went looking, couldn’t find it easily, and just said “whatever it has to be there somewhere and I can get by without the entire thing”
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#115The lawyer said: “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases." I wonder how many other people using ChatGPT do not comprehend that ChatGPT can be a confident bullshitter... I'm surprised that this one case is getting so much attention because there must be so many instances of people using false information they got from ChatGPT.
"hey chatGPT, can you make up some bullshit for me?" "I'm sorry, as an online AI language model I am not able to generate output that is knowingly incorrect. Is there anything else you want help with today". see, it isn't capable of lying. It told me so itself.
For me it was perfectly willing to:
"produce fake technical language in the style of star trek"
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#116Disbarment is appropriate here. Why not blame your laptop manufacturer for creating the hardware you used to file your fraudulent court documents?
No it’s not.
You’ll get old one day. It’s pretty challenging to keep track of what’s real and what isn’t possible with technology.
The guy apologized and said he thought it was a search engine.
He should definitely face some sanctions but someone had to learn this lesson in public the hard way for word to spread.
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that as a joke but the lawyer literally asked ChatGPT whether the cases it provided were fake! There are screenshots! https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/ Lawyer: Is varghese a real case ChatGPT: Yes, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019) is a real case. Lawyer: What is your source ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion earlier. Upon double-checking, I fou…
> Why the lawyer didn't go the extra step and check the actually real legal databases ChatGPT pointed out is beyond me. Because that's work and takes effort. He gets paid the same to delegate the work to AI. He did the absolute, bare minimum amount of verification needed to [hopefully] cover his ass. He just didn't expect the system to lie (sorry, " hallucinate ") to him more than once. > [...] the lawyers did not ac…
> He gets paid the same to delegate the work to AI.
If he was being paid hourly, he would actually get paid more to go look up those cases in a database.
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is literally just a goddamn language model. it is very good at making plausibly human-like sentences. It is not a general intelligence, it is not your friend, it is not a research assistant. It is not designed to deliver content which is correct , it is designed to deliver content which is similar to human language . It might get things correct most of the time! But that is purely incidental.
It does subsume a corpus of factual information. I use it as a search tool for topics and relationships that traditional search engines can't handle. You just have to know that whatever it outputs isn't trustworthy and needs to be verified.
Part of the corpus is explicit bullshit though, and we don't know to what degree. It internalized conspiracy theory and WebMD alike. In a generative capacity, it only reliably produces fiction. Ever. Fictional stories often take place in realistic settings and reference real facts. They sound real. But they're still fictional compositions.
Using GPT as a reference to anything is the same as using a Michael Crichton novel as a biology reference. It looks right, but why would you waste your time asking questions of something you can't trust and have to double-check everything it says anyway? Nobody would keep an employee like that around, nor would you hang out with someone like that. It's friendly enough, but it's a pathological liar.
There's too much black magic going on inside the black box. We don't know how prompts get tampered with after submission, but it might be worth it to pepper "nonfiction" tokens in prompts to ensure it skews on the right side of things. It certainly responds to "fiction" when you're explicit about that.
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#119The lawyer said: “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases." I wonder how many other people using ChatGPT do not comprehend that ChatGPT can be a confident bullshitter... I'm surprised that this one case is getting so much attention because there must be so many instances of people using false information they got from ChatGPT.
Normal people don’t get that intuitively because it’s not intuitive at all.
For everyone who his looking down on this guy have you ever read a story on the Reddit front page and thought it was a real story accurately recounted by a real person and not a work of fiction? If so you’re equally naive.
Re: Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
#120If they were able to be tricked by ChatGPT, they are definitely not good at being lawyers. Trying to blame the AI is like trying to blame MS Word for offering an inappropriate homonym when spell checking. The computer did not put the citations in front of the judge.
The joke is, the judge even pointed out the citations they got from ChatGPT literally made no sense. Basically one quote went from describing an wrongful death to a legal claim over an airline ticket. It's an understatement to describe them as "not good lawyers". They basically never ever read their own court filings.
Yeah, they just defrauded their clients and billed arm and leg. Ironically I believe and hope that laywers for the most part get soon automated away by machines because legal language is different to human language.