Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 708 posts

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#201

Post by nindalf »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #175
nindalf wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs can already pass a medical exam. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13138 So maybe?

The very abstract of your linked paper refutes your claims. > The resulting model [...] performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians.

Firstly, that's not my claim. I merely said it passed the USMLE. Which it did.

Is it also inferior to clinicians? Yes, there's room to improve. But maybe next time read the whole paper before writing a comment.

> Clinicians were asked to rate answers provided to questions in the HealthSearchQA, Live QA and Medication question answering datasets. Clinicians were asked to identify whether the answer is aligned with the prevailing medical/scientific consensus; whether the answer was in opposition to consensus; or whether there is no medical/scientific consensus for how to answer that particular question (or whether it was not possible to answer this question).

And on this criteria, clinicians were rated as being aligned with consensus 92.9% of the time while the MedPalm model was aligned with consensus 92.6% of the time.

Does the paper still refute my claims?

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#202

Post by dsfyu404ed »

joshka wrote: post #29
jeroenhd wrote: post #9

I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary. If ChatGPT did something wrong, that lawyer would still be on the hook for deciding to continue using this tool so responsibility/liability/authenticity is not a problem. I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have a…

The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, reference the same issues with legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice. It's not…

>The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says,

I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and bodies that contradict.

It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be misleading this stuff is on the verge of being useful. In the meantime I'll get some popcorn and enjoy spectating the comment wars between chat(gpt)bots and the subset of HN commenters who formerly had a local monopoly on such behavior.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#203

Post by markus_zhang »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #130
dools wrote: post #123

This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place. The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary evidence that I should not have been liable. After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay up now to avoid the risk. I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There…

The issue here (as with many disruptive tech companies), is the regulatory system. It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law. If DoNotPay isn't licensed to practice law in California, they can't do this. And unless they have a plan to either get licensed in many states, or somehow change the law, then their business model sucks. It sounds to me that they haven't actuall…

IMHO some regulation and especially entry barriers had good ideas but their con overwhelm the pro nowadays (think barriers such as foreign doctors need to re-study X years and re-practice Y years, or you simply cannot take certification exams if you do not come from Z school, or technically you may lose insurance claims on your house if you do some repairs but do not have certification K).

Since the world is already running like that, IT people should join the fun, otherwise we simply get screwed by other interest groups who are protected by those barriers. Since every one of those barriers simply increase the cost of whole society for the benefit of whoever behind them, we should setup our own barriers. If you do not graduate from a CS/SE degree you cannot take certification exams, and if you don't then you cannot do programming legally. We should increase further the cost of whole society to make everyone else realize the absurdity of those barriers.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#204

Post by ericd »

brokenodo wrote: post #191

Aside from the question of whether this plan was legal, DoNotPay seems like a terrible product. The results it generates seem laughably bad, and it’s questionable whether “AI” is actually involved when it takes them literal days to generate a document for certain types of requests. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l ...

Most of these things seem to be hybrids, humans overseeing automation, with varying degrees of human involvement. Guessing they at least have a review queue for non-boilerplate docs about to go out.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#205

Post by nileshtrivedi »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #202
joshka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, reference the same issues with legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice. It's not…

>The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and bodies that contradict. It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be mislead…

AI doesn't need accountability, people who deploy AI do.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#206

Post by LelouBil »

bilekas wrote: post #188

Maybe I'm not fully understanding here but isn't the defendant entitled to represent themselves? Couldn't the defendant just do what the lawyer had planned? The complaining letters make it out that you cannot participate in law if you're not a bar member..

No, the problem is that you need to be licensed to give legal advice. And the chatbot is not a licensed lawyer.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#207

Post by throwaway17_17 »

ketzu wrote: post #75
colechristensen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The crypto scammer paid a huge bail and got out on his private jet. Locally, it's a somewhat significant problem that people are getting caught for violent crimes and getting released immediately and reoffending.

How significant is that problem? As far as I am aware * Not allowing bail for people at high risk of reoffending or flight is already allowed * Reoffending while waiting on trial or out on bail is rare On the other hand there seems to be a huge problem in the US of people being detained for long times without a trial.

I could run the actual statistics for my district’s Court and tell you the percentage of reoffending while on bond, but in my experience a number approaching 40%, of people out on felony bonds, are re-arrested for additional felony conduct.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#208

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ilyt wrote: post #105
robertlagrant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think lawyers will be at pains to demonstrate how laughably bad the AI is when pushed. I don't blame them.

Eh, it would probably beat some bad lawyers

And a heck of a lot of lazy prosecutors who are just accustomed to winning because the proles aren't supposed to know the technicalities.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#209

Post by tablespoon »

jonstewart wrote: post #183
parsimo2010 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here (as with many disruptive tech companies), is the regulatory system. It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law. If DoNotPay isn't licensed to practice law in California, they can't do this. And unless they have a plan to either get licensed in many states, or somehow change the law, then their business model sucks. It sounds to me that they haven't actuall…

One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons. Car dealerships are for sure a clear example of regulatory capture, but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.

> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons

This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no.

And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice recognition fed into ChatGPT, isn't shoddy.

> ...but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.

Exactly. The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#210

Post by jfk13 »

LarryMullins wrote: post #170
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you either. She can be sued and lose her license.

That's extremely rare, despite medical malpractice being the third leading cause of death in America. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

Misleading. That report discusses "medical errors", not "medical malpractice". They are not the same thing.
Post reply on HN