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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

#61

Post by sdellis »

cj wrote: post #21
pfortuny wrote: post #10

Honest question: Do these systems not share data with the AI servers? Or are they all local (on-site, not on-computer)? I am totally baffled by the trust people put on these systems, sharing with them the most obviously private data.

> I am totally baffled by the trust people put on these systems The average person doesn't care about online privacy.

They care, but realize that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The amount of obsession required to maybe maintain some degree of privacy is not something most people are willing to do.

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

#62

Post by atonse »

This is where I think either realtime transcription (or just in time followed by deleting everything) will be an end state.

Especially real-time transcription where the AI actually takes notes (instead of just recording every word and has a dump of it somewhere) can be appealing. Then there isn't any record of the raw sentences, and things that aren't relevant are immediately discarded without any written record.

OpenAI's realtime whisper and other such models will become the default over time.

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

#63

Post by LanceH »

mock-possum wrote: post #38
LanceH wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is audio always kept in addition to transcripts? (genuine question, I rarely record either)

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

#64

Post by SecretDreams »

derektank wrote: post #48
SecretDreams wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to also be harder to hide completely legal, but not ideal stuff. Like randomly complaining about your boss to a colleague or casually discussing a feature you're stuck working on that you think is a bad idea.

>casually discussing a feature you're stuck working on that you think is a bad idea. I’ll be honest, this is something that I hope AI note taking tools capture and incorporate into summaries of the company’s status. Especially if they act as an intermediary without revealing the specific person who said it. There’s a lot of information latent within organizations that doesn’t get properly shared due to concerns of re…

That information is often intentionally not cascaded up the chain because the higher up you go, the more rigid the thinking gets - at least in my experience. Upstream doesn't want to hear the bad news or hear about how their idea is dumb. They want us to just do the bad idea and if the bad idea doesn't work out, they want to hang the ICs out to dry.

Maybe some smaller shops are not like this, but the bigger your company is, the more you'll find this type of thinking to persist.

In theory, I do like your idea - anonymously cascading feedback upstream. I just see no avenue for this to succeed in practice.

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

#65

Post by ffsm8 »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #60
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…

It's just a token predictor what do you expect? What we need are tools that embrace that and ping the agent to validate what it just said or double check. But the trade off is that this might hamper their capabilities to some level

While you're correct in what tthe audio models are - at least somewhat (they're not exactly like text based llms), you seem to brush his point away too quickly before fully exploring it.

This is a solvable issue, the current model and harnesses just aren't made with that assumption - hence they're doing "best effort while guessing if unsure".

Give it a few more months to years and things will likely settle how he pitched - at least in the context of note taking: only let it become "lore" if it didn't have to guess a word.

Currently there is basically only one mode - and it's optimized for conversation. The note taking is just glued on with that functionality as the backbone, and that's probably not going to stay.

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

#66

Post by camdenreslink »

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.

The AI note summaries in meetings I'm in are frequently totally inaccurate. They are actually inaccurate in two ways: they fabricate things that were never said (but always kind of close to something that was said), and they emphasize the totally wrong thing (e.g. acting like the entire conversation was about one topic when that was just a very small part).

I sincerely hope these aren't used in court.

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

#67

Post by kjs3 »

rpaddock wrote: post #17

Some companies want no records at all, see: "2028 – A Dystopian Story By Jack Ganssle": http://www.ganssle.com/articles/2028adystopianstory.htm Known as ’The Rule of 26’, which is sometimes given as a reason NOT to keep engineering notebooks etc. By Federal Rule 26 you are guilty if you did not volunteer the records before they are requested. Including any backups. From Cornel Law: LII Federal Rules of Civil Procedur…

Much of my experience with corporate counsel is one of 2 extremes: "keep everything"[1] or "keep nothing". Keep everything, because then you can't be caught out deleting something possibly relevant, which looks very, very bad in court. Keep nothing, because then opposing counsel can't catch you out only keeping things that make you look good in court.

[1] There's actually a subset of this, which includes "...until you are legally allowed to delete it, then delete everything". This is driven by regulation (e.g. SOX in the US).

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

#68

Post by rayiner »

camdenreslink wrote: post #66
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.

The AI note summaries in meetings I'm in are frequently totally inaccurate. They are actually inaccurate in two ways: they fabricate things that were never said (but always kind of close to something that was said), and they emphasize the totally wrong thing (e.g. acting like the entire conversation was about one topic when that was just a very small part). I sincerely hope these aren't used in court.

They will be discovered and used in litigation, and the results will be hilarious. Think about how much lawyers pick apart language (like statutes or the constitution) that was written deliberately by humans and subject to review and revision. Now we're going to have lawyers, e.g., seizing on word choice in AI notes that might have a sinister connotation when the original wording was innocuous.

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

#69

Post by yagizdagabak »

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.

my fear exactly. same with something like Meta glasses. and i feel like we have moved quickly from the regulatory problems to "'tis a fact of life"
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