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A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
101–110 of 204 posts
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#102Alternative to archive.is No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no geoblocking, no DDoS directed at blog https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...
you forgot to mention it requires 13 minutes of audio listening
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#103Frankly, at the very least any entity that receives any kind of public money and/or benefits, including any and all corporations, should be required as part of their receipt of public money or benefits of any kind, including legal protections, i.e., limited liability, to record ever single conversation anyone has in the executive level where all the horrible decisions are made, the plundering is done, and the current de facto immunity from prosecution for crimes is enjoyed.
If you receive even just limited legal liability protections ... you are receiving a public benefit and you should be required to record every single conversation, including if you involve your personal devices, every single personal conversation you had on your personal devices of any kind, short of reporting accidental contamination.
It seems people are way too ok with all the abuse and criminality of our politicians and executives at all levels and accountability really needs to be reintroduced into the system. Or are we simply going to wait for a coulee more Luigi events and the ruling class then just dropping the mask on the prison system surveillance state they have constructed around even the USA?
But I realize that is probably wishful thinking because it seems we long crossed the threshold of accountability, where the citizens had enough power to actually affect a requirement that all meetings and communications of any and all politicians, bureaucrats, and executives be recorded and even made public in most cases.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#104Back 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?
"Anticipate" is strong. Even the mere possibility of something bad happening, even if unlikely, is probably enough to outweigh the positives. In this case, that's just "saying things of grey morality in recorded settings."
My primary worry would be things being taken out of context when circumstances change later. Maybe there's lawsuit discovery, or maybe you have a falling out with a coworker who tries to defame you. The last thing you want is a motivated adversary to be given access to a wide trove of things that could be reframed to be used against you.
And it's not just off-color jokes or insensitive comments. At one job, we had a project that involved "fudging" billable numbers for a completely legitimate purpose. I was the one insisting that we don't use that term in writing at all to avoid any potential future misunderstandings. Call it an "adjustment" or "algorithmic modification" or something, but not "fudging" or "fabricating." Same kind of reasoning.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thing is, if LLMs are stochastic parrots predicting the next word (aka, a partially decent auto complete), there's no reason it can't complete as "I don't know" - as that's a perfectly valid sentence too. That's why I'm still cautiously optimistic about LLMs somewhere being good enough. I don't know if or when someone will manage to do it, but I'm hopeful.
Damn, did I say something wrong or unpopular to get a downvote?
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#106The 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.
Plus they are super inaccurate. Gemini gets one of its three bullet subtly or very majorly wrong almost every time. Just a few weeks ago Gemini said we’re rolling out our payment setup in Russia. You know the place where we have 20+ sanctions packages on? We were talking about France in the meeting.
Verbatim transcriptions are usually very good. Because even the ocasional "can/can't" replacement is usually obvious within the context of the full conversation.
But the summarization feature is where the most ridiculous errors and omissions happens.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#107Back 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…
When I say something inappropriate on the phone or over Discord, I always tell the NSA guy listening it was a joke.
This is an old joke, but as AI becomes more and more capable it becomes increasingly likely that the government will have some kind of intelligence sifting though every post you make and message you send.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Not the person who said this, but it's easy: Grow up in a country where the government listening in is common (without any transparent due process), and it becomes second nature. And then add to that how easy it is to record phone conversations with today's phones (I've done it), it's easier on the brain to assume it's being recorded as opposed to wondering if it is. But yes, I don't care about my dirty jokes being r…
Not necessarily. Snowden has proven the US intelligence agencies can basically intercept anyone's electronic communications, and that they do this is a giant scale.
And yet, we still see comments of people horrified when you said you assume as default that someone (or more likley, something) is listening.
The normalcy bias is too strong.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#109Earlier 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
> 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 ju…
Older ML systems were much better at exposing their internal confidence. Plenty of papers reverse out this kind of interpretability for open weight models. All the models exposed logprobs early on. This seems solvable if prioritized. The unintelligible words should be lower confidence. Getting per-token data for the output that aids with understanding the predictions is entirely feasible as engineering effort - it just won't be enough to address all the problems - but it should help quite a bit.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#110I think tools like this are needed but the current default of "random SaaS bot joins every call and uploads the whole thing somewhere" feels like the worst possible version of it.
The whole point should be that the people in the meeting can actually focus on the conversation rather than half listening while trying to write down enough notes to remember it later. If you're paying people good money to be in a meeting, having them spend half of it doing low quality note taking is a bit mad.
This is basically the reason I've been building Whistle Enterprise (https://whistle-enterprise.com). I'd much rather have something where I choose to record a meeting, process it locally, generate the document and then decide what to keep or delete. I mean yea, it still creates a record so it doesn't solve the legal / discovery side, but at least you're not also adding a random third party into the middle of every conversation.