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AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

law.stanford.edu

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Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#211

Post by thenickdude »

qingcharles wrote: post #152
causal wrote: post #7

As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others. I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.

I've used general purpose LLM AI (e.g. run-of-the-mill Claude, GPT etc) heavily to draft legal documents. The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. You can get really comf…

>The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation

The "biggest problem" being the one thing that is trivial to verify against concrete databases is a bit convenient don't you think?

I think it's more likely that it makes mistakes evenly but the one thing that you are able to check with certainty is the only place you discover the errors.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#213

Post by Forgeties79 »

nopurpose wrote: post #193
Forgeties79 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody is disputing that. I specifically said that I can see the improvements from the last six months. What I’m saying is we can’t assume that every two years it will improve at the same rate.

The further we get into this, the more AI feels like 3-D printing. Significantly bigger and will be more widely used for sure. But nowhere near the “new industrial revolution” that all these companies are making it out to be

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#214

Post by jstummbillig »

greggoB wrote: post #181
jstummbillig wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does it really matter? It seems fairly obvious that AI is going to outperform professors. While the studies run, there are three more model releases that change the calculus entirely. I wonder how much we are learning with these studies about what is going on.

> I wonder how much we are learning with these studies about what is going on. So your alternative is to not have any studies and everyone can just stump up anecdata as "evidence" for the capabilities of these models?

Doing things that are well meaning, but ineffective is not great policy. The simplest alternative to doing things that don't work is always not doing them. Better ideas are of course welcome, but not required.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#215

Post by piker »

Having been a law student and practicing lawyer, it's clear to me that law professors aren't really representative of much if any part of private practice. Most of the things they think and reason about are quite theoretical and academic, and it doesn't surprise me that the models would regurgitate a more average response which most human graders would prefer.

That's the entire point, though!

The legal academy is supposed to have outlying opinions on things and present novel philosophical answers to questions. (And questions to answers!) So in addition to the statistical arguments against this paper made elsewhere, to me it doesn't real much new information.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#216

Post by causal »

zuzululu wrote: post #66
thewebguyd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is probably true for most skilled professions. AI is best used in the hands of folks already knowledgeable in the skills/professions they are using it for. I liken it to me googling things as a sysadmin vs. Jane from accounting doing it. The non-tech end user is far more likely to make the problem worse, or install something sketchy from the ad riddled results than I am, or one of my help desk employees…

im not so sure i think devs overestimate their own role and underestimate others i am seeing lawyers and doctors roll out their own software with AI but we dont have their training and experience

Also worth remembering that LLMs have jagged intelligence. They are probably better software developers than anything. Is there a complement to Gell Mann Amnesia- where you assume it’s good at other jobs because it’s good at yours?

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#218

Post by FeepingCreature »

thenickdude wrote: post #211
qingcharles wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used general purpose LLM AI (e.g. run-of-the-mill Claude, GPT etc) heavily to draft legal documents. The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. You can get really comf…

>The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation The "biggest problem" being the one thing that is trivial to verify against concrete databases is a bit convenient don't you think? I think it's more likely that it makes mistakes evenly but the one thing that you are able to check with certainty is the only place you discover the errors.

I've made the same experience with programming AI. It is very convenient, but convenient doesn't mean unlikely. The universe appears to have given us a convenient thing here.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#219

Post by skywhopper »

gguncth wrote: post #186
godelski wrote: post #101

I 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.

Your “some methodological deficits” is doing a lot of work.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#220

Post by 15155 »

causal wrote: post #7

As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others. I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.

> drafting a will

Tell me you've never been the executor of an estate in the United States without telling me.

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