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AI Destroys Institutions

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Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#131

Post by UncleMeat »

terminalshort wrote: post #58
DannyBee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush? I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start? I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken…

I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons: 1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future. 2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome. 3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.) Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is…

What do you mean "formatted like a scientific paper?"

Law review articles look like this. Scientific journals don't own the concept of an abstract, nor are law review articles pretending to be scientific research.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#132

Post by UncleMeat »

rpdillon wrote: post #122
DannyBee wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did actually read all 40 pages of it. I frequently read law journal articles, among with lots of other types of journals and papers. I also used to maintain up to date reading lists of various areas (compiler optimization, for example) because I would read so many of the papers. Let me give you a piece of advice: First, gather facts, then respond. Here you start by sarcastically asserting i wouldn't have read it, b…

His criticism that the paper is speculation is spot on. Many of the references don't support the claims they are cited for. It's fascinating to me that you want to argue the poster's standing to make a criticism more than you want to actually discuss the content of the paper.

Its a particularly weird criticism given that Danny is a lawyer and has experience in the CS research community. He is especially well suited to address a criticism that the authors are trying to trick people into thinking their work is a scientific paper, which is plainly a ridiculous criticism.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#133

Post by tim333 »

The arguments that "AI Destroys Institutions" seem pretty iffy. I scrolled down to see what institutions had been destroyed it went on about Elon Musk's Doge destroying stuff but their closing say USAID I think had zero to do with AI.

I'm in the UK and I don't think any institutions have been destroyed or even noticeably harmed by AI. In the US there is general chaos under Trump so it may be hard to differentiate.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#134

Post by xpe »

chrisjj wrote: post #109
ahartmetz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just met a dog for the first time, you can't :) - my guess is LLMs are somewhere in between. It would be cool to see what happens if somebody tried to make an LLM that somehow has ethical principles (instead of guardrails) and is much less eager to please.

The stochastic parrot LLM is driven by nothing but eagerness to please. Fix that, and the parrot falls off its perch.

> The stochastic parrot LLM is driven by nothing but eagerness to please. Fix that, and the parrot falls off its perch.

I see some problems with the above comment. First, using the phrase “stochastic parrot” in a dismissive way reflects a misunderstanding of the original paper [1]. The authors themselves do not weaponize the phrase; the paper was about deployment risks, not capability ceilings. I encourage everyone people who use the phase to go re-read the paper and make sure they can articulate what the paper claims and be able to distinguish that from their usage.

Second, what does the comment mean by “fix that, and the parrot falls off the perch.”? I don't know. I think it would need to be reframed in a concrete direction if we want to discuss it productively. If the commenter can make a claim or prediction of the "If-Then" form, then we'd have some basis for discussion.

Third, regarding "eagerness to please"... this comes from fine-tuning. Even without it (RLHP or similar) LLMs have significant prediction capabilities from pretraining (the base model).

All in all, I can't tell if the comment is making a claim I can't parse and/or one I disagree with.

[1]: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" (Bender et al., 2021)

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#135

Post by rpdillon »

UncleMeat wrote: post #132
rpdillon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His criticism that the paper is speculation is spot on. Many of the references don't support the claims they are cited for. It's fascinating to me that you want to argue the poster's standing to make a criticism more than you want to actually discuss the content of the paper.

Its a particularly weird criticism given that Danny is a lawyer and has experience in the CS research community. He is especially well suited to address a criticism that the authors are trying to trick people into thinking their work is a scientific paper, which is plainly a ridiculous criticism.

I'd love some clarity on that.

The linked page says this:

``` How AI Destroys Institutions

77 UC Law Journal (forthcoming 2026)

Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623

40 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2025 Last revised: 13 Jan 2026 ```

What exactly is this document? It reads like a heavily cited op-ed, but is coming out of a law school from a professor there and calls itself a "research paper". Very strange.

EDIT: I looked up UC Journal of Law, and I think I was misled because I'm not familiar with the domain. They describe themselves as:

> Since 1949, UC Law Journal, formerly known as Hastings Law Journal, has published scholarly articles, essays, and student Notes on a broad range of legal topics. With roughly 100 members, UCLJ publishes six issues each year, reaching a large domestic and international audience. Each year, one issue is dedicated to essays and commentary from our annual symposium, which features speakers and panel discussions on an area of current interest and development in the law.

So this is congruent with the Journal's normal content (it's an essay), but having the document call itself a "research paper" conjured an inflated expectation about the rigor involved in the analysis, at least for me.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#136

Post by terminalshort »

chrisjj wrote: post #125
terminalshort wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who stand to benefit are you. If I have to pay a lawyer $1000 to review a contract, or spend $10 in tokens, I win. OpenAI may make $9 off of those tokens, or they may make $1. But that doesn't matter at all to me. I care about the $1000 vs $10, not the $9 vs $1.

Does the quality of the work matter at all to you?

It certainly does, but that's not guaranteed with humans either. Nor is it the only factor that matters. It's a cost benefit tradeoff. If I am on trial for a crime, obviously I will pay for the quality. If I want to know what some language in a simple contract means, I will ask a LLM.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#137

Post by terminalshort »

__loam wrote: post #128
pousada wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it cost 100k minimum in the US to get a lawyer? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Many lawyers work on contingency and take a set proportion of the settlement if they win instead of charging hourly.

That's assuming you are the one doing the suing and not the one getting sued. And even then, that applies to only very limited types of cases. And even then, the contingency is typically 33% (and sometimes can even eat over 50%) of your damages awarded, so the cost is massive in any case.

There is the option of small claims court which is massively cheaper, but it has very low limits for damages, so it's barely worth the effort.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#138

Post by pousada »

terminalshort wrote: post #112
pousada wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it cost 100k minimum in the US to get a lawyer? Or am I misunderstanding something?

There is no "get a lawyer." You pay by the hour. And there is months to years of procedure before the judge even knows your lawsuit exists.

And the minimum to file a lawsuit comes out to 100k at standard rates ? Or was it just a random number?

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#139

Post by terminalshort »

DannyBee wrote: post #111
terminalshort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you must have read all 40 pages of it, right? Because if not you are a hypocrite. I claim that the Bible is the literal truth. Oh, you haven't read every word of the Bible? Your arguments against me are worthless!

I did actually read all 40 pages of it. I frequently read law journal articles, among with lots of other types of journals and papers. I also used to maintain up to date reading lists of various areas (compiler optimization, for example) because I would read so many of the papers. Let me give you a piece of advice: First, gather facts, then respond. Here you start by sarcastically asserting i wouldn't have read it, b…

> Even if we were being nice, and treat your claim colloquially as meaning "most of it is speculation", this would still require reading some of the paper, which you didn't do either.

I did read a some of it. The abstract. Which is there for the specific purpose of providing readers a summary to decide whether it is worth their time to read the whole thing.

And, yeah, obviously I didn't mean literally all because that just isn't how people talk. e.g. the author's names are not speculation. But the central premise of the paper "How AI Destroys Institutions" is speculative unless they provide a list of institutions that have been destroyed by AI and prove that they have. The institutions they list, "the rule of law, universities, and a free press," have not been destroyed by AI, so therefore, the central claim of the paper is speculative. And speculation on how new tech breakthroughs will play out is generally useless, the classic example being "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," by the CEO of IBM.

Furthermore their claim here: > The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt within a hierarchy of authority and a framework for roles and rules while maintaining legitimacy in the knowledge produced and the actions taken. Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

This just completely contradicts any experience I have ever had with such institutions. Especially "empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo". Yeah. If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you. These guys are some serious koolaid drinkers. Large institutions are where creativity and risk taking go to die. So yeah, not reading 40 pages by these guys.

You can tell a lot from a summary, and the entire premise that you have to read a huge paper to criticize is just bullshit in general.

Re: AI Destroys Institutions

#140

Post by terminalshort »

pousada wrote: post #138
terminalshort wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "get a lawyer." You pay by the hour. And there is months to years of procedure before the judge even knows your lawsuit exists.

And the minimum to file a lawsuit comes out to 100k at standard rates ? Or was it just a random number?

It's going to cost you around $100K if you're lucky, and it could be a lot more. That's what I mean. There are no exact numbers because it depends on how many hours of lawyering it takes to get through the endless process and procedure (designed by lawyers, of course) before you ever even go to court. You can't know that in advance. And if the other side has more money than you, they know its to their advantage, so they will try to drag out the process and bleed you dry to gain leverage or even force you to drop the case.
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