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Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

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Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#101

Post by cosmicgadget »

LadyCailin wrote: post #6

Everything about this entire situation is comically dumb, but shows how far the US has degraded, that this is meaningful news. If this were a fiction book, people would dismiss it as being lazy writing - an ultra conservative CEO of a pillow company spreads voting conspiracies leading to a lawsuit in which they hire lawyers that risk losing the case because they relied on AI.

Let's not forget the majestic event that was Cyber Symposium.

But here we have an example of someone not escaping justice due to his now-evaporated wealth. I'd call it a positive.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#102

Post by everybodyknows »

Balgair wrote: post #60

Wait until you guys hear about how they used AI in the California bar exam . https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/controversy-californi... The lawyer jokes aren't funny anymore...

> ... response to the widespread disruptions, the Committee of Bar Examiners, or CBE, voted on April 18 to lower the raw passing score for the February exam from 560 to 534, “two standard errors of measurement below ...

Although different states are involved, perhaps this goes some way toward explaining how Lindell's lawyers could have passed their bar exams.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#103

Post by chneu »

rsynnott wrote: post #11

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

They think everyone is doing it and not getting caught.

Everything the right accuses anyone of, they're doing it too. That's why they don't really care about criminals and pedophiles and racists in their ranks. They think everyone is a child diddling criminal racist.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#104

Post by everybodyknows »

tiahura wrote: post #28

As an attorney, I’ve found that this isn’t the issue it was a year ago. 1. Use reasoning models and include in the prompt to check the cited cases and verify holdings. 2. Take the draft, run it through ChatGpt deep research , Gemini deep research and Claude , and tell it to verify holdings. I still double check, for now, but this is catching every hallucination.

Thanks for giving us the reality check. Distasteful as some here find it, squarely presenting the facts of what is surely becoming common practice is a service to the public.

With the Court's reply to Lindell, you now have an independent test case upon which to test your verification process and compare results against a "rival implementation" -- the Court's. One wonders if it may be AI-assisted as well. I'd be quite interested in hearing how the two stack up.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#105

Post by Balgair »

everybodyknows wrote: post #102
Balgair wrote: post #60

Wait until you guys hear about how they used AI in the California bar exam . https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/controversy-californi... The lawyer jokes aren't funny anymore...

> ... response to the widespread disruptions, the Committee of Bar Examiners, or CBE, voted on April 18 to lower the raw passing score for the February exam from 560 to 534, “two standard errors of measurement below ... Although different states are involved, perhaps this goes some way toward explaining how Lindell's lawyers could have passed their bar exams.

I'm not too familiar with his lawyers, but I suspect they passed their exams a long time ago in another state.

Bar exams are funny things. Most states have a reciprocity with the NY bar, so when you think lawyer, think the NY bar.

But California is considered a harder bar to pass and has little reciprocity.

Somewhat surprisingly the hardest bar is Louisiana's. This is because their legal system is a crawdad fucking mess. They inherited their code based system from the French for a lot of local matters, but then also have to deal with the precedent based system the rest of the US uses. So you have to memorize two completely different types of law at a very high level. So, if you ever meet a Louisiana lawyer, you know you've met a very intelligent and dedicated person.

Obligatory IANAL here.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#106

Post by BlueTemplar »

mrob wrote: post #65
halgir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it in much the same way as you, and it's been extremely beneficial. But I also would not dream of signing my name on something that has been independently produced by AI, it's just too often blatantly wrong on specifics. I think people who do are simply not aware that AI is not deterministic the same way a calculator is. I would feel entirely safe signing my name on a mathematical result produced by a calculato…

LLMs are deterministic [0]. An LLM is a pure function that takes a list of tokens and returns a set of token probabilities. To make it "chat" you use the generated probabilities to pick a token, append that token to the list, and run the LLM again. Any randomness is introduced by the external component that picks a token using the probabilities: the sampler. Always picking the most likely token is a valid strategy. T…

But then isn't this also technically true that any software including a pseudo-random number generator is deterministic ? (Starting with itself, like that sampler you mention ?)

And while it might be important in some contexts, like debugging using either the exact same or different seeds, isn't this one of them where it rather confuses the issue ?

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#107

Post by kayodelycaon »

swores wrote: post #35
kayodelycaon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked ChatGPT to give Wikipedia links in a table. Not one of the 50+ links was valid.

Which version of GPT? I've found that 4o has actually been quite good at this lately, rarely hallucinating links any more. Just two days ago, I gave it a list of a dozen article titles from a newspaper website (The Guardian), asked it to look up their URLs and give me a list, and to summarise each article for me, and it made no mistakes at all. Maybe your task was more complicated to do in some way, maybe you're not…

Definitely more complicated. I've been playing around with using it to analyze historical data and using it to generate charts. And yes I've tried many different kinds of phrasing. I have experience working with and writing rules based "expert systems" and have a vague idea of how neural networks are used for image recognition. It's a pretty fun game to get useful information out of ChatGPT.

You cannot ask it to have crop yield as a column in a chart and get accurate information.

It only seems reasonable when doing a single list of items. Asking it for two columns of data and it starts making things up. Like bogus wikipedia links.

You could definitely make the argument I'm using it wrong but this is how people try to use it. I still find this useful because it gives me a start on where to point my research or ask clarifying questions.

It's much better at giving you a list of types of beer and wine that's been produced in history. Just don't trust any of the dates.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#108

Post by Macha »

rokkamokka wrote: post #12
grues-dinner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I constantly see people reply to question with "I asked ChatGPT for you and this is what it says" without a hint of the shame they should feel. The willingness to just accept plausible-sounding AI spew uncritically and without further investigation seems to be baked into some people.

Shame? It's often constructive! Just treat it for what it is, imperfect information.

If I wanted ChatGPT's opinion, I'd have asked ChatGPT. If I'm asking others, it's because it's too important to be left to ChatGPT's inaccuracies and I'm hoping someone has specific knowledge. If they don't, then they don't have to contribute.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#109

Post by BlueTemplar »

grues-dinner wrote: post #8
victorbjorklund wrote: post #3

I dont understand how a lawyer can use AI like this and not just spend the little time required to check that the citations actually exist.

I constantly see people reply to question with "I asked ChatGPT for you and this is what it says" without a hint of the shame they should feel. The willingness to just accept plausible-sounding AI spew uncritically and without further investigation seems to be baked into some people.

'member the moral panic when students started (often uncritically) using Wikipedia ?

Ah, we didn't knew just how good we had it...

(At least it is (was ?) real humans doing the writing, you can look at modification history, well made articles have sources, and you can debate issues with the article in the Talk page and even maybe contribute directly to it...)

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#110

Post by swores »

lolinder wrote: post #93
swores wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes you're right - I didn't clarify this in my original comment, but my anecdote was indeed the ChatGPT interface and using its ability to browse the web[#], not expecting it to pull URLs out of its original training data. Thanks for pointing that out. But the reason I suggested model as a potential difference between me and the person I replied to, rather than ChatGPT interface vs. plain use of model without bel…

Right, but ChatGPT doesn't always automatically use search. I don't know what mechanisms it uses to decide whether to turn that on (maybe free accounts vs paid makes a difference?) but I rarely see it automatically turn on search, it usually tries to respond directly from weights. And on the flip side, my local Llama 3 8b does a pretty good job at avoiding hallucinations when it's hooked up to search (through Open We…

I'm just specific in my prompting, rather than letting it decide whether or not to search.

These models aren't (yet, at least) clever enough to understand what they do or don't know, so if you're not directly telling them when you want them to go and find specific info rather than guess at it you're just asking a mystic with a magic ball.

It doesn't add much to the length of prompts, just a matter of getting in the habit of wording things the right way. For the request I gave as my example a couple of comments above, I wrote "Please search for every one of the Guardian articles whose titles I pasted above and give me a list of URLs for them all." whereas if you write "Please tell me the URLs of these Guardian articles" then it may well act as if it knows them already and return bullshit.

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