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GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

papers.ssrn.com

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Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#51

Post by arctic-true »

qgin wrote: post #34

It 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.

But who controls the computer? It can’t be the government, because the government will sometimes be a litigant before the computer. It can’t be a software company, because that company may have its own agenda (and could itself be called to litigate before the computer - although maybe Judge Claude could let Judge Grok take over if Anthropic gets sued). And it can’t be nobody - does it own all its own hardware? If that hardware breaks down, who fixes it? In this paper, the researchers are trying to be as objective as possible in the search for truth. Who do you trust to do that when handed real power?

To be clear, federal judges do have their paychecks signed by the federal government, but they are lifetime appointees and their pay can never be withheld or reduced. You would need to design an equivalent system of independence.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#52

Post by conradev »

rco8786 wrote: post #33
scottLobster wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

The courts already have algorithmic oracles for specific judgements, like sentencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPAS_(software)

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#53

Post by Lerc »

rco8786 wrote: post #33
scottLobster wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#54

Post by jagged-chisel »

fullshark wrote: post #42

The legal profession is going to be very different in 10 years. Anyone considering law school today is crazy.

I agree on "different." On the second sentence, it depends on what your definition of "crazy" is in this case.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#55

Post by sjudson »

The main problem with this paper is that this is not the work that federal judges do. Technical questions with straight right/wrong answers like this are given to clerks who prepare memos. Most of these judges haven't done this sort of analysis in decades, so the comparison has the flavor of "your sales-oriented CTO vs. Claude Code on setting up a Python environment."

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, judges focus their efforts on thorny questions of law that don't have clear yes or no answers (they still have clerks prepare memos on these questions, but that's where they do their own reasoning versus just spot checking the technical analysis). That's where the insight and judgement of the human expert comes into play.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#56

Post by jmalicki »

The title is wrong.

The title of the paper is "Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI"

When they say legally correct they are clear that they mean in a surface formal reading of the law. They are using it to characterize the way judges vs. GPT-5 treat legal decisions, and leave it as an open question which is better.

The conclusion of the paper is "Whatever may explain such behavior in judges and some LLMs, however, certainly does not apply to GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro. Across all conditions, regardless of doctrinal flexibility, both models followed the law without fail. To the extent that LLMs are evolving over time, the direction is clear: error-free allegiance to formalism rather than the humans’ sometimesbumbling discretion that smooths away the sharper edges of the law. And does that mean that LLMs are becoming better than human judges or worse?"

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#57

Post by Zafira »

qgin wrote: post #34

It 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.

> nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer

I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.

Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.

Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.

Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#58

Post by qwertox »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #50
qwertox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-and-white thinking. You can have a team of agents exchange views and maybe the protocol would even allow for settling the cases automatically. The more agents you have, the higher the nuances.

Presumably all these agents would have been trained on different data, with different viewpoints? Otherwise, what makes them different enough from each other that such a "conversation" would matter?

Different skills or plugins, different views and different tools for the analysis of the same object. Then the debate starts.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#59

Post by arctic-true »

rco8786 wrote: post #33
scottLobster wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.

Re: GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment

#60

Post by thewanderer1983 »

I was diagnosed with a rare blood disease called Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) which is part of a group of diseases called myeloproliferative neoplasms. This happened about three years ago. Recently, I decided to get a second opinion and my new specialist changed my diagnosis from ET to Polycythemia Vera (PV). She also highly recommended I quickly go and give blood to lower my haematocrit levels as it put me at a much higher risk of a blood clot. This is standard practice for people with PV but not people with ET. I decided to put the details into google AI in the same way that the original specialist used to diagnose me. Google AI predicted I very likely had PV instead of ET. I also asked Google AI how one could misdiagnose my condition with ET instead of PV and google correctly explained how. My specialist had used my high platelet count and blood test that came back with a JAK2 mutation then after a bone marrow biopsy to incorrectly diagnose me with ET. My high hemoglobin levels should of been checked by my first specialist as an indication of PV not ET. Only the second specialist picked up on this. Google AI took five seconds, and is free. The specialists costs $$$ and took weeks.

But yeah AI slop and all that...

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