We turn off the AI note taker for the legal liabilities discussed in the NYT article. But we've also found its accuracy bad enough to warrant kicking it out, independent of legal issues. We have simultaneous participants from USA, India, France, Israel, and Estonia. Some have heavy accents (English is the meeting language). No problem for the humans, but the AI just can't cope (yet).
A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
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Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#162Earlier 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
IIRC people actually measured it, and one of the things RLHF does is to turn the fairly well-calibrated probability judgments of the raw predictive model into an essentially binary and much more inaccurate “definitely” / “no idea, coin toss”, the former member of the pair being of course much more frequent. The architecture is perfectly capable of uncertainty, it’s the humans that hate it and sand the capability off until the result fits their preconceptions.
(Which is intensely depressing to a human that doesn’t.)
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#163The 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.
> 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. The parts that aren’t privileged. On the other hand, perhaps the truth-seeking function of the justice system will be better equipped than before when we had to rely on (more) faulty human recollection.
No idea why this was downvoted? That’s what the justices system tries to do.. find the truth. Missing or obfuscated evidence works against that.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are making a lot of assumptions about the "average" person. Here's a Pew Research study that says otherwise:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-an...
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#165Why are phone calls or SMS under attorney-client privilege[1] but AI transcripts of a call with an attorney isn't? I was under the impression there isn't any expectation of privacy from phone carriers either. AI's recording of a conversation is actually more like a fourth-party, no?
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-legal-help/what-ar...
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#166Somewhat off-topic: I've spent thousands of pounds on legal advice which has ranged from poor to mediocre. I found that most solicitors would refrain from giving proper advice and are there only to be instructed.
You have to do your own homework, read the law, the case-law, prepare notes and documents, etc. With the rise of LLMs I found it easier to do all these things and come prepared to these meetings, or even do some of the solicitor's work on your own. For example I've found Gemini 3 to be exceptional at reasoning on the legal side - to the extent where I was able to explore and reason about very thorny topics from all sides.
I found the legal profession to be a prime candidate to disruption using LLMs, especially the initial consultation phase (Do I have a claim?). One of the things that's protecting the status-quo, for the time being, is the law - for example in the UK you can't actually offer any sort of legal services without being SRA-accredited. There's also lots of secrecy within the profession, and lots of procedural tricks that lay people are not aware of. AI could make all of these more accessible for the lay person.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#167The 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.
Is it reasonable to expect any call going through a computer to be off the record, even without AI? Recordings were always discoverable, the only difference is that a paralegal doesn't need to manually go through every recording to determine if it's relevant.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#168Many employers prohobit them by policy.
Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#169Re: A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are making a lot of assumptions about the "average" person. Here's a Pew Research study that says otherwise: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-an...
That research study also concludes that “59% of people have no understanding of what companies do with the data they collect”
To me, that says the average person doesn’t care enough (they care, just not enough) to do anything about it.
They might care enough to spend 5 seconds signing a petition, but not enough to spend 5 minutes installing an ad blocker, and definitely not enough to spend 5 hours doing anything more extreme like de-googling their life.