Tangential, is there a "test suite/CI" for AI writing legal documents? Long back in terms of AI progress, a lawyer filed something with hallucinated sources. Do new tools prevent this?
AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
191–200 of 384 posts
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#192In many (most?) countries you can defend yourself, waive your court appointed attorney. You are of course highly discouraged to do so. But sometimes people do it, mostly for smaller claims where they don't want to rack up legal bills for things which might cost more than what is at stake.
But, it makes me wonder, will clients be able to use these AI-attorney systems in the future, in the court. Where they basically either just parrot what the model is instructing them to do, or - I dunno - give the model permission to speak for them (while waiving liabilities).
I have no doubt that some complex AI system can perform better than a bottom-tier, overworked lawyer.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.
Assuming it keeps improving at the same rate, which I think we are already seeing not play out. If you compare the first six months when GPT truly hit the mainstream to the previous six months, the improvements are not nearly as evident. That isn’t to say they aren’t noticeable, I could definitely tell it’s improving, but not nearly at the pace it once was. There’s also the fact that they can’t possibly keep improvin…
On the other hand we keep seeing only marginal generational imorovements in CPU space, yet performance gains over last 10 years in CPUs are very material.
Every new model might not be a leap like it used to be, but give it enough time and improvements add up.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.
Assuming it keeps improving at the same rate, which I think we are already seeing not play out. If you compare the first six months when GPT truly hit the mainstream to the previous six months, the improvements are not nearly as evident. That isn’t to say they aren’t noticeable, I could definitely tell it’s improving, but not nearly at the pace it once was. There’s also the fact that they can’t possibly keep improvin…
it's also worth keeping in mind that alot of the 'improvements' are actually advancements in harnesses and tools.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#195I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading. Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol There's als…
Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.
The issue is, it almost always outperforms knowledge workers.
IF the right questions are asked, and IF steered into and corrected at a few crucial points. IF not it goes off in the wrong direction really quick and that's a problem that's still mostly unsolved in the last 2 years.
And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong place can mean bankruptcy or even cost a life.
I help run a few marketing websites where I let the CEO's run crazy with Claude cowork, they are making PR's like a madman, but they are not allowed to touch any of the API's & platforms where there is real user data & sensitive information.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#196I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading. Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol There's als…
Agreed. The study might show something useful, but the headline is doing a lot of work.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#197What is the point of this conclusion? That law professors like the tone and verbosity of AI slop? Okay?
I had a similar thought. What if the result, statistical and significance critique aside, mostly means that when it comes to first-year tutoring of law students, the vibe, tone and overall presentation of arguments weighs a lot, maybe even more than the factual arguments themselves?
In such a framing I don't find it surprising at all that teachers prefer the more polished answers generated by AI, because if LLMs are good at one thing, it is being confident in whatever they generate and present it convincingly.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.
The issue is, it almost always outperforms knowledge workers. IF the right questions are asked, and IF steered into and corrected at a few crucial points. IF not it goes off in the wrong direction really quick and that's a problem that's still mostly unsolved in the last 2 years. And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong p…
Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#199The title of the study "Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers" is VERY different from the title on HackerNews. This is completely clickbait at this point.
Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
#200I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading. Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol There's als…
Independent of whether it has any meaning (because the entire paper might be a bit iffy), I find it curious that Instructors 3 and 8 have the lowest harmfulness rates, quite a bit lower than even the LLMs, but not the highest preference rates. Harmfulness anticorrelates with preference, but not perfectly. Some amount of charisma appears to be a factor even in selections by professionals?
This is exactly why I'd be cautious about interpreting the preference metric too strongly