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Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

theguardian.com

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Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#141

Post by jstarfish »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #97
notavalleyman wrote: post #35

> Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said. Seems like they still don't get it. It's not good faith representation of your client, it's not good lawyering to interrogate a chatbo…

Are we all using the same definition of "good faith"? That just means to deal honestly and sincerely without any intent to defraud, deceive, or harm the other party. I don't see any proof that shows they intended to deceive rather than that they were clueless.

This right here is what people are overlooking in their contempt.

The attorney used it as a research tool, and even foolishly thought to use it to validate that it wasn't making shit up. It's a really embarrassing mistake that's only obvious in the eyes of people familiar with the technology. There is nothing about this that suggests they intended to deceive, only intent to be a lazy idiot.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#142

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #27
BlakeSimpson wrote: post #9

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.

>completely mainstream to the point where we'll find out what happens when an entire society at once stops trying to think/work

You really need not wait that far if you have been observant enough, they are they were at one point clownish enough to believe in religion, now the vast majority of them believe in 'science' etc. Over reliance on Chat GPT is just the one of the newest manifestation of laziness and dumbness.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#144

Post by djur »

Ensorceled wrote: post #10
mindcrime wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the notion that it should be "career ending", but I do think they got off pretty light.

They doubled down on their original mistake rather than admit what they did, even when it was quite clear the judge and opposing council was on to them. They should be disbarred.

The judge cannot disbar them, but the opinion provides all of the evidence necessary.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#145

Post by dctoedt »

In court, good lawyers think of themselves as "officers of the court" — to use a sometimes-forgotten phrase — who are working not just for their clients but also for the judge, to help the judge (and the judge's law clerks) to get it right, with rulings that will stand up on appeal if it comes to that.

The good lawyer's job is not just to advocate the client's position — it's also to do "completed staff work" for the court in the process, even acknowledging any weaknesses in the client's case (which builds credibility).

As we've seen in the ChatGPT case, judges tend to respond badly when they think a lawyer is trying to put one over on them.

And conversely, judges often respond favorably when they perceive that a lawyer is being thorough and intellectually honest, not merely throwing up any bullshit argument that comes to mind. A fond memory from years ago is when a federal judge called me and my opponent — a well-known lawyer in our field — into his chambers to talk about a pending motion that involved an uncertain point of law, which we had extensively briefed. My opponent had not done an especially-great job; my own briefing had acknowledged the weak points in my client's position but also explained why my client should win anyway. The judge said, I don't really know what the answer is here. He then turned to me and said, But I'm more comfortable with your analysis. And he ruled my way – which won the case for my client (a company you might well be a customer of today).

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#147

Post by jldugger »

dragonwriter wrote: post #84
jeroenhd wrote: post #46

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…

> 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? Well, no, they also have to right letters and attach the sanctions order, and the transcript of the sanctions hearing to: (1) their client in the…

>They both failed their duty in nearly identical ways

Once they showed up in court, one of them was unable to explain how to interpret a very basic "you should know this to practice law" case citation ("F.3d"[1]). Not only did they not "apply independent professional analysis" it seems they were woefully unprepared to even produce such a thing.

[1]: https://youtu.be/oqSYljRYDEM?t=1526

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#148

Post by qayxc »

SoftTalker wrote: post #129
xen2xen1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Do we even know why AIs "hallucinate"?

It's because, just like human memory, they aren't databases or search engines. Generative transformer models are basically next-word-prediction machines on steroids. They take the input and try to "guess" the most likely reply based on their training data.

These machines have no way to distinguish facts from fiction, only probabilities of combinations of words that would make the most plausible reply.

> Is it possible to prevent it?

There are methods to prevent this by incorporating specialised knowledge databases into the training material of these models. This, however, only works with models that have been finetuned on very specific tasks and topics [1].

Other approaches use AI to transform human questions ("bag of words" inputs) to queries into structured knowledge bases, match the results (e.g. tree-like structures of context and facts) to the question and turn them back into human language [2]. The downside of these methods is that they're currently limited to simple QA formats and won't feel as "natural" as talking to chatbot and requires carefully prepared and curated knowledge databases.

[1] http://jens-lehmann.org/files/2019/iswc_bert_simple_question...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13284

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#149

Post by naniwaduni »

tonightstoast wrote: post #123
sarchertech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a lot of ways, the first two years of US undergrad are "remedial high school". This also explains how, e.g. American undergrads typically declare their majors until mid to late into their second years.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#150

Post by s1artibartfast »

hartator wrote: post #22
s1artibartfast wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this doubling down? It certainly isn't in this article.

It is: > then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.

Did they?
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