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A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#31

Post by LanceH »

burningion wrote: post #6

The main point raised in the article is that these bots may void attorney client privileges. But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

> But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

I would add that their is no guarantee their are correct as well.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#32

Post by LanceH »

vintagedave wrote: post #2

Paywall: can anyone share what the issue is? Inaccuracy in meeting minutes? Leaking private info, re security of notes? I have never used them (don't trust them to accurately capture what is important in a meeting vs just noting what's mentioned), but the concept seems very useful to me.

They are saying that it could invalidate attorney client privilege because the transcription could technically be available to an outside party.

I suspect what isn't being said by the lawyers is they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#33

Post by aspenmartin »

r_lee wrote: post #29
user_7832 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. Imo this is the single biggest flaw of LLMs. They're great at a lot of things, but knowing when they're wrong (or don't have enough information to actually work on) is a critical flaw. IMO there's nothing structural about why they shouldn't be able to spot this and correct themselves - I suspect it's…

I don't think it's a training issue, it's simply that there's no inherent "I don't know" in the transformer architecture unless it's really like something completely unknown, otherwise the nearest neighbor will be chosen and that will be whatever sounds similar or is relevant, even if it might cause a problem

Not inherent in transformer architecture, we do try to ingrain a sense of uncertainty but it’s difficult not only technically but also philosophically/culturally. How confident do you want the model to be in its answer to “why did Rome fall”?

Lots of tools in our toolbelts to do better uncertainty calibration but it trades off against other capabilities and actually can be rather frustrating to interact with in agentic contexts since it will constantly need input from you or otherwise be indecisive and overly cautious. It’s not technically a limitation of transformer architecture but it is more challenging to deal with than other architectures/statistical paradigms.

Like you can maintain a belief state and generate conditional on this and train to ensure belief state is stable and performant. But evals reward guessing at this point, and it’s very very hard to evaluate the calibration in these open ended contexts. But we’re slowly getting there, just not nearly as fast as other capabilities.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#34

Post by vintagedave »

close04 wrote: post #5
vintagedave wrote: post #2

Paywall: can anyone share what the issue is? Inaccuracy in meeting minutes? Leaking private info, re security of notes? I have never used them (don't trust them to accurately capture what is important in a meeting vs just noting what's mentioned), but the concept seems very useful to me.

It's in the viewable text on the page. > A trendy productivity hack, A.I. note takers are capturing every joke and offhand comment in many meetings. They could also potentially waive attorney-client privilege. By now everyone knows that AI notes that aren't curated by a human will catch every silly thing that was said in the meeting while omitting the context of the tone or body language. Something as simple as "yeah…

> It's in the viewable text on the page.

Not for me - there was no viewable text.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#35

Post by moffkalast »

user_7832 wrote: post #14
operation_moose wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've found they're surprisingly good if everyone on the call is using a decent headset. The problems start when using conference room audio or someone is on their laptop mic. If they miss a word they never do unintelligible , they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. We just went through a round of 100+ (non-sensitive) VoC interviews and they really cut down the workload of compiling all of…

> If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. Imo this is the single biggest flaw of LLMs. They're great at a lot of things, but knowing when they're wrong (or don't have enough information to actually work on) is a critical flaw. IMO there's nothing structural about why they shouldn't be able to spot this and correct themselves - I suspect it's…

It's a benchmark and eval issue. Guessing gets them the right result sometimes and the models rank better in error rate than they'd otherwise. We need the kind of benchmarks that penalize being wrong WAY more than saying "I don't know".

Of course there's a secondary problem that the model may then overuse the unintelligible option, but that's something that's a matter of training them properly against that eval.

You could also try thresholding the output based on perplexity to remove the parts that the model is less sure about, but that's not going to be super accurate I think.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#36

Post by mock-possum »

stego-tech wrote: post #27
burningion wrote: post #6

The main point raised in the article is that these bots may void attorney client privileges. But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

This. The fact LLMs can also amplify existing closed-set research means even smaller shops can now search through a flood of documents to find smoking guns or critical evidence, much faster. I’ve been saying it since the mid-10s, but it’s worth repeating: data isn’t gold, it’s more like oxygen in a room in that the higher the concentration, the more likely it is to poison the inhabitants or explode with an errant spa…

What are you trying to get away with I wonder?

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#38

Post by mock-possum »

LanceH wrote: post #31
burningion wrote: post #6

The main point raised in the article is that these bots may void attorney client privileges. But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

> But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later. I would add that their is no guarantee their are correct as well.

You’d use a computer generated transcript as a guide, not as proof - the proof is the recording of the person actually saying the thing, not the LLMs best guess of what it imagined the person saying.

“At timestamp X, person Y said Z” says the robot, and then you dutifully scrub the audio to timestamp X to verify.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#39

Post by bilekas »

analogpixel wrote: post #22

unrealted to the article, but how do you make a page that that prevents the mouse scroll wheel from working? that's pretty impressive.

It's no impressive, it's scummy hiding news behind a paywal, they simple use some CSS trickery to set the height of the content to the size of your view, so there is nowhere to scroll to.

Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

#40

Post by triceratops »

watwut wrote: post #19
burningion wrote: post #6

The main point raised in the article is that these bots may void attorney client privileges. But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

Basically, it will be harder to hide illegal and unethical stuff companies routinely engage in.

That's an argument for recording everyone on earth 24/7. Is that what you mean?
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