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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

#111
post #26

What I find really strange about this is I use AI a lot as a “smart friend” to work through explanations of things I find difficult etc and I am currently preparing for some exams so I will often give the AI a document and ask for some supporting resources to take the subject further and it almost always produces something that is plausibly close to a real thing but wrong in specifics. As in when you ask for a refere…

People are lazy. I’m enrolled in a language class in a foreign country right now - so presumably people taking that class want to actually get good at the language so they can actually live their life here - yet a significant portion of students just turn in ChatGPT essays. And I don’t mean essays edited with chatGPT, but essays that are clearly verbatim output. When the teacher asks the students to read them out lou…

LLMs were originally designed for translation, so it makes sense. We have basically elimated the need to learn foreign languages for day to day use anyway, its only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.

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

#112

What I find really strange about this is I use AI a lot as a “smart friend” to work through explanations of things I find difficult etc and I am currently preparing for some exams so I will often give the AI a document and ask for some supporting resources to take the subject further and it almost always produces something that is plausibly close to a real thing but wrong in specifics. As in when you ask for a refere…

What this story tells us more than anything is that Lindell cannot convince a competent lawyer to defend him, so what he gets instead are clownshod phonies. Either he’s out of cash, or he’s such a terrible client that nobody with a shred of professional responsibility will take him.

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

#113
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you could share the actual prompts & info you wanted I would be curious to try and see if it is indeed too complex for it or if prompting differently would work better, because I've had it produce tables with multiple columns pulling info from different sources for different columns before so that's definitely not a hard limit... so would be happy to come back to you either with advice on how to do it next time, or with agreement that having tried it myself it is indeed ChatGPT not your prompting that was the problem.

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

#114
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...

How ? The issue seems to have been that they had not revealed that LLMs were involved in the creation of the multiple choice questions. The questions/answers themselves seem to have passed the bar ? (no pun intended)

A much worse failure seems to have been the incompetent software to run the tests. And that for something as high level they would have decided to do it through the mediation of a computer as well as used multiple choice questions in the first place.

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

#115
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about the quality of lawyer who would take Lindell as a client. He’s a bankrupt, likely mentally ill acolyte of a dude who is infamous for stiffing his lawyers. His connection with reality is tenuous at best.

Our justice system prides itself on giving everyone due process and a fair trial, even people you hate

I don't think anyone claimed he doesn't deserve due process. The only people I know of arguing against due process lately are in fact those in the Whitehouse.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias on your part. There's plenty of incompetence (and outright fraud) on the other side as well. Rememebr Michael Avenatti?

is Stormy Daniels the far left?

See, the logic is that Stormy Daniels caused Dear Leader trouble, anyone who gets in Dear Leader's way or causes him trouble is Radical Left, therefore Stormy Daniels is Radical Left.

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

#117
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, hallucinations occur when LLM is missing information.

That's not correct, and seems to be based on a common misunderstanding of how LLMs work, the rough idea being that when the info the model is being asked for had been in the data used for training, it "looks it up" not unlike software looking up info from a huge database of general knowledge, and that when that lookup fails it falls back to making stuff up. But that's wrong, the models are actually doing the exact same thing when they're hallucinating as when they're correct, just the result is different.

Hallucinations happen when the model determines that the most likely suitable string of tokens turns out to contain incorrect information, regardless of whether the correct information is "missing" or whether the correct information actually would have been outputted had it, when selecting the first token of the response, instead selected the option that it considers second best rather than best.

Whether or not a piece of information was in the training set can obviously influence the likelihood of a model hallucinating when asked about the subject, but it can easily hallucinate about stuff that was in the training and it can also get things right that weren't in the training data.

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

#118
post #10

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.

It's not "a little time"

Checking if a case exists or not is little time in the context of legal research.

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

#119
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you could share the actual prompts & info you wanted I would be curious to try and see if it is indeed too complex for it or if prompting differently would work better, because I've had it produce tables with multiple columns pulling info from different sources for different columns before so that's definitely not a hard limit... so would be happy to come back to you either with advice on how to do it next time, o…

Prompt:

I would like a list of east Indiamen from 1750 to 1800 where you can find how many tons burthen and how many crew. Show as a chart and give me the wikipedia links to the ships. Do not include any ships that do not have wikipedia links.

Here's my customization:

    What do you do?: 
    Software Engineer

    What traits should ChatGPT have?: 
    Show all the options
    Be practical above all.

    Anything else ChatGPT should know about you?:
    I’m an author of science fiction and fantasy.
    I like world building for stories.

I know there's hundreds of ways to phrase this and I could probably trick it into generating the chart first and finding the wikipedia links second. :)

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

#120
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry for going off topic here but I've had the same experience. I'm not sure which update improved 4o so greatly but I get better responses from 4o than from o4-mini, o4-mini-high, and even o3. o4 and o3 have been disappointing lately - they have issues understanding intent, they have issues obeying requests, and it happened multiple times that they forgot the context even though the conversation consisted of only 4…

No need for the apology, and FYI I broadly agree with everything you say (except about 4.5, which I don't actively disagree with I just haven't played with it myself).
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