Now with bonus hallucinations of statute and case law!!!
That's not what this study shows
GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
31–40 of 254 posts
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#32Oh look, LLMs can _still_ pattern match words!
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#33IANAL, but this seems like an odd test to me. Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls. If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-…
Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a se…
I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#34It seems that a lot of people would rather accept a relatively high risk of unfair judgement from a human than accept any nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer, even if the risk is smaller with the computer.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#35> In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all.
hah. Sure.
> Subjects were told that they were a judge who sat in a certain jurisdiction (either Wyoming or South Dakota), and asked to apply the forum state’s choice of law rule to determine whether Kansas or Nebraska law should apply to a tort case involving an automobile accident that took place in either Kansas or Nebraska.
Oh. So it "made no errors at all" with respect to one very small aspect of a very contrived case.
Hand it conflicting laws. Pit it against federal and state disagreements. Let's bring in some complicated fourth amendment issues.
"no errors."
That's the Chicago school for you. Nothing but low hanging fruit.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#36What’s interesting here from a legal perspective is that they acknowledge a somewhat unsettled question of law regarding South Dakota’s choice-of-law regime. The AI got the “right” answer every time, but I am curious to know if it ever grappled with the uncertainty. This is the trouble with the concept of AI judging: in almost any case, you are going to stumble across one fact or another that’s not in the textbooks or an unsettled question of law. Even the simplest slip-and-falls can throw weird curveballs. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced AI can reason from first principles about how to understand these new situations or extend existing law to meet them. But in such a case there is no “right” answer, and certainly not a verifiable answer for the AI to sniff out. At least at the federal level, judicial power is only vested in people nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate - in other words, by people who are chosen by, and answer to, the people’s elected representatives. Often, unappointed magistrates and special masters will come in to help deal with simpler issues, and perhaps in time AI systems will be able to pick up some of this slack. But when the law needs to evolve or change, we cannot put judicial power in the hands of an unappointed and unaccountable piece of software.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#37IANAL, but this seems like an odd test to me. Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls. If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-…
The legal system leaves much to be desired in relation to fairness and equity. I’d much prefer a multi-staged approach with an 1) AI analysis, 2) judge review with high bar for analysis if in disagreement with the AI, 3) public availability of the deliberations, 4) an appeals process.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a se…
I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.
To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.
Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#39The premise seems flawed. From the paper: “we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges” That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system. Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based…
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Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
#40The premise seems flawed. From the paper: “we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges” That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system. Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based…
I don't think that common law doctrine applies here though. The facts of any particular case always apply to that specific case no matter what the system. It is the application of the law to those facts which is where they differ, and in common law systems lower courts almost never break new ground in terms of the law. Judges almost always have precedent, and following that is the "legally correct" outcome.
Choice-of-law is also generally a statutory issue, so common law is not generally a factor - if every case ever decided was contrary to the statute, the statute would still be correct.