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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

#71

Post by cj »

sdellis wrote: post #61
cj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When the average person thinks about "online privacy" they think about keeping things private from other people. They don't think about keeping their data private from the companies hosting/processing their data.

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

#72

Post by skinfaxi »

gwbas1c wrote: post #47

Back when I was in college, in a fraternity, we always assumed that the phones were tapped. Specifically, we never spoke about alcohol or marijuana (now legal) on the phone. Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email. The same applies to speak…

> Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

This is horrifying. Why do you feel the necessity to self-censor? What consequences do you anticipate?

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

#73

Post by JohnBizBiz »

atonse wrote: post #62

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. Ope…

[flagged]

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

#74

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

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

> It's just a token predictor what do you expect?

The point isn't that it's unexpected. It's that prior text-to-speech systems were much better about this particular failure mode, prone to spitting out entirely incorrect words but not rephrasing entire sentences.

This is a particularly bad failure mode because people don't notice it.

> What we need are tools that embrace that and ping the agent to validate what it just said or double check.

This is not a problem that can be fixed by throwing more AI at it. It's a shared problem to all such systems, whether they're audio-text transformers or LLMs. Agentic review would just further push the system towards creating output that looks correct, but is not.

LLM translation does the same, yielding more natural text, but generally not better translation. In several cases, especially the "easy" translation between similar languages (e.g. within a language group like Germanic or Nordic) LLM-powered translation is notably worse than more primitive "word & phrase book" systems, tending to change the meaning of the text in order to have good grammar whereas these older systems would give crude or grammatically incorrect translations that still retained the core meaning.

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

#75

Post by hugh-avherald »

sandworm101 wrote: post #13

>> Executives and corporate boards generally expect conversations with their legal team about legal matters to have attorney-client privilege. They lose that protection if they share the same information with outside parties — and it’s possible that an A.I. note taker could have the same effect. Total oversimplification. The fact is the privilege is a rule totally in the hands of the court. Every time a new communica…

It sounds like the prison recordings were compulsory, which is a different kettle-of-fish. The key phrase "if they share" implies voluntary and deliberate action, and is not much of an oversimplification imo.

> What matters is that the parties intended and expected communications to be privileged.

I would contend that your summary, not theirs, is a oversimplification. Jurisdictions will obviously differ, but privilege does not attach merely because of the intent and beliefs of the lawyer and client.

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

#76

Post by feoren »

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

The final output of the neural network part of an LLM is a vector with weights for every token, that is then usually softmaxed and picked from. Can we not quantify the uncertainty by looking at the distribution of weights of the top 10 options? Like we expect for a note-taking app that the top choice would be something like 98% certain, and if we see that the model gives a weight of 60% to "Russia" and 30% to "France", that's just not enough certainty to simply output "Russia". That's exactly when it should say "" or something instead.

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

#77

Post by repelsteeltje »

ffsm8 wrote: post #65
netdevphoenix wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pit…

> 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.

I'm hesitant to admit even that. Like any computational linguistics problem, accuracy relies on coverages of all levels: form morphology, through syntax and semantics to speech act and world knowledge.

I worked with state of art speech recognition in healthcare setting. The model was specifically trained on small set of languages with emphasis on covering medical terminology.

It worked great for conversations most of the time, but sometimes messed up very badly. For instance when patient would mention the name of a relative, a street address or phone number. Spelling out an email address would mess it up completely.

It's just like when you're a horrible typist and rely on spell checking: The red squibles are gone, but the story no longer makes sense. Or when you "autofix" a syntax error, but the meaning diverges from your intention.

As the technology improved the number of words decreases, but the mistakes get more severe.

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

#78

Post by jghn »

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

> what do you expect?

If the prediction strength is below X, put an indicator that it couldn't make a valid prediction?

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

#79

Post by EvanAnderson »

gwbas1c wrote: post #47

Back when I was in college, in a fraternity, we always assumed that the phones were tapped. Specifically, we never spoke about alcohol or marijuana (now legal) on the phone. Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email. The same applies to speak…

> Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family.

Adding to that: If you live in a one-party consent state assume you're being recorded by any of the parties in a face-to-face conversation, too.

Yeah-- it sucks that the world is this way. I deal with it. What I don't want to see are draconian controls on technology (which will ultimately be ineffective) in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #13

>> Executives and corporate boards generally expect conversations with their legal team about legal matters to have attorney-client privilege. They lose that protection if they share the same information with outside parties — and it’s possible that an A.I. note taker could have the same effect. Total oversimplification. The fact is the privilege is a rule totally in the hands of the court. Every time a new communica…

[deleted]
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