It blows my mind that a lawyer would go through all the schooling and DEBT just to use ChatGPT and risk losing their BAR card. Sure, I see plenty of uses for ChatGPT in their field, but to not even check the output before submitting it is what blows my mind.
It shouldn't be so mindblowing. People are lazy and dumb, as much so as they're allowed to be. We're a year away from this tech being completely mainstream to the point where we'll find out what happens when an entire society at once stops trying to think/work because there's a machine to do it for them now.
And this is exactly why I don't think Communism will work.
> all they had to pay was $5k. They still risk being disbarred (not just hypothetically, it might actually happen) + taking a massive hit to the reputation (their own + the firm). The latter one alone is a strong punishment, given how widely-publicized this incident was in the media. It cost the firm a lot of potential clients, and the lawyer might struggle with finding a decent position after the fact (given how muc…
From country where medschool is done by entrance exams the whole "premed" always sounded extremely weird and wasteful. They already have longest training time and then more is added on top?
Med school in those countries tends to last a year or 2 longer. Also most other countries have national education programs for secondary school. High school in the US is regulated at the state and local level, so it’s very variable. As a consequence, the first 2 years of college tends towards general and education. Another note, there’s also a med school entrance exam in the US.
Sure but in the US it is 4 (undergrad) + 4 (med school) so in total it is 8 years rather than 5 or 6.
Agreed regarding the US high school standards but students that take AP courses in high school can take the MCAT. They may not do the “best” but they will know some of the material. Schools in the US like UMKC have 6 year programs were high school students take the MCAT.
Everyone is piling onto you here, but another aspect is that many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them. With that information I think it's less mind-blowing, they were simply assuming ChatGPT could do the work of a paralegal
I've worked with legal software professionally a few times, and kept thinking software won't replace lawyers, it'll replace paralegals. Not all, but a great deal of grunt work could be replaced with AI and good forms. Now if we could get them not to lie?
There still needs to be a human manually proofreading them, even if it's as trivial as looking up whether the cited cases actually exist. Same goes for code outputs from currently available AI tools: some still needs to debug them to make sure it works, and fix any troubles that spring up during deployment and production.
Of course after some number of iterations, AI may gain the ability to self-check and self-correct to the point of achieving 100% accuracy, but I think that milestone will quickly lead to AGI and job security will quickly become an obsolete topic for every industry anyways.
> According to polls, doctors are the 2nd most trusted profession. n=1 anecdote here: When I was in research track biochem and bumped into premed students, nearly the entire population of premed didn't seem to care about the science behind what they were learning. They formed a very different social clique. The "top students" in that set were sharing previous years' organic chemistry exams and none of them would read…
From country where medschool is done by entrance exams the whole "premed" always sounded extremely weird and wasteful. They already have longest training time and then more is added on top?
In theory, the point of having medical students have an undergrad degree is that they will be more "well rounded". Unlike in many countries where university education is very focused, in the US, an undergraduate even studying STEM is required to take a certain number of courses like literature or history, and likewise someone studying literature or history is required to take some science courses. Of course just requiring people to take courses doesn't mean they will actually retain the knowledge after the tests, but it's a nice idea anyway.
Why so eager to end someone's career? He did a lazy/stupid thing. People do far worse things. The client may want to sue them and seek damages or something and that'd be fair but I don't think their career should end. That's harsh.
Gross negligence. Checking sources is a cornerstone of professions that are highly reliant on citing sources.
What they did was the professional equivalent of a surgeon thinking "I wonder what'd happen if I chopped out this thingie?", then acting on that impulse, then lying about his actions.
With that logic all us programmer's careers should be ended due to the bugs we introduce because "they are equivalent of a surgeon thinking...". It's not equivalent to that. Nobody lost their leg over this.
Most programmers don't have to pass through rigorous education to be professionally certified on par with lawyers or surgeons.
It shouldn't be so mindblowing. People are lazy and dumb, as much so as they're allowed to be. We're a year away from this tech being completely mainstream to the point where we'll find out what happens when an entire society at once stops trying to think/work because there's a machine to do it for them now.
If they used ChatGPT to find real cases that's not lazy, that's smart. The dumb and lazy part was NOT CHECKING ON THE NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR SOMETHING YOU SENT TO A JUDGE. Sorry for the caps, but so, so stupid. IIRC they asked ChatGPT if it lied, and it said no..
And they doubled down on dumb and lazy when the judge first raised the flag that something was wrong with what they submitted.
Everyone is piling onto you here, but another aspect is that many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them. With that information I think it's less mind-blowing, they were simply assuming ChatGPT could do the work of a paralegal
I've worked with legal software professionally a few times, and kept thinking software won't replace lawyers, it'll replace paralegals. Not all, but a great deal of grunt work could be replaced with AI and good forms. Now if we could get them not to lie?
Do we even know why AIs "hallucinate"? Is it possible to prevent it?
LegalEagle did a video on this case two weeks ago, digging into it in some more depth: https://youtu.be/oqSYljRYDEM They lied to a judge, doubled down, showed further incompetence by admitting to not knowing how the legal reference they supposedly quoted was even structured, then lied to a judge again trying to get more time to get their story straight, and all it cost them was $5000? And even then they have the guts…
Imagine if your only responsibility is to check the work of someone deemed untrustworthy, to protect everyone else from their malice or incompetence, and you just skip doing that and lie and say you did it.