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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

#221

Post by skywhopper »

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…

I find it entirely likely that the preference for the AI generated answers is entirely due to the confidence of its assertions. Given the numbers of evaluations each prof had to do, there’s no way they researched the answers thoroughly. But if there’s one thing we all know LLMs can do well, it’s to generate text that sounds extremely confident. And that signal is appealing in choosing which of two statements you’d give to students.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#222

Post by gaiagraphia »

airstrike wrote: post #61

Yes, LLMs are great at search. That's not news.

Isn't "getting greater" the more accurate representation, though?

In 'critical' industries, the error rate is massively important, and if the quality of search is reaching an acceptable error rate, that's quite big news.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#223

Post by internet_points »

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.

"the study that claims it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers has methodological deficits" ftfy

so extrapolating from that, in another two years it will continue to bamboozle

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#224

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

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…

Just because the citation exists, what the LLM says it stands for and what it actually stands for are not the same.

For testing, I've asked (admittedly last-gen) LLMs to generate legal opinions regarding issues in commercial English civil litigation, and I received back cases where the citation is real, but the area of law (family law) is not relevant as family courts apply a very different set of procedural rules.

(If you squint a bit, they sometimes might be relevant... and could be useful for a particularly creative litigator to make a novel argument on behalf of a very risk tolerant client. But you would very much want to go read those cases and think quite hard about them.)

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#225

Post by 15155 »

bonesss wrote: post #208
TrackerFF wrote: post #192

In 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 e…

Pro se litigants are hyper vulnerable to LLM hallucinations. One wrong advice clump and, like a step onto the wrong path while hiking, all subsequent steps go in the wrong direction. And sycophancy tuning means marginal one-sides takes get presented as sure-fire things. I’m of the opinion that the big wins aren’t in using the LLMs to do the work (legal, in this case), but rather to refine and improve the dialog and p…

> Arguably this is a racket and a thin veneer of plausible deniability for authoritarian rule.

The fact that Lexis and WestLaw have such an iron grip on the entirety of the US legal system is exactly why general LLMs are completely unequipped to be useful in this domain.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#226

Post by alberto467 »

goolz wrote: post #198
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years"

IDK "not any of it" seems a bit strong, especially thinking towards 2028. For a lot of knowledge professions, there is a surprising amount of tasks that are just dumb work compared to the rest.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#227

Post by pezgrande »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #195
gguncth wrote: post #186

Earlier 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…

I kinda disagree. High risk environments just means that they will have to have a human-in-the-loop for a longer time which drastically reduce the skill required for such human (which is still requires high skill just not stupidly high).

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#228

Post by TrackerFF »

bonesss wrote: post #208
TrackerFF wrote: post #192

In 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 e…

Pro se litigants are hyper vulnerable to LLM hallucinations. One wrong advice clump and, like a step onto the wrong path while hiking, all subsequent steps go in the wrong direction. And sycophancy tuning means marginal one-sides takes get presented as sure-fire things. I’m of the opinion that the big wins aren’t in using the LLMs to do the work (legal, in this case), but rather to refine and improve the dialog and p…

I think it could work for some things. Years before LLMs became capable of doing anything substantial, people were selling "legal services" via websites where people could dispute trivial stuff like parking tickets, and what have you in the small courts.

Those services were usually just based on NLP + simple decision trees, and people actually won their cases.

Of course, doing huge corporate contract disputes, IP disputes, M&A, and whatever will probably be out of question for a good while. Same with more serious criminal cases where the stakes are very high.

But I think there's potential for automating away less serious cases, especially where there's good structure.

And of course, it all depends on what kind of legal system one is situated in. Immediately I'd think that Civil Law would be easier for AI lawyers, as its inherent structure is a better fit for machine reasoning. So I'd expect to see more AI products start in Civil Law countries.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#229

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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.

As someone who's been sued frivolously...

Believe it or not...

A lot can go wrong if you have real life human lawyers draft a legal document.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#230

Post by grosswait »

ulrischa wrote: post #207

By its very nature, the field of law is ideally suited for AI language models. Fundamentally, everything is based on interconnected texts. I believe that even larger waves of layoffs could loom here than in the IT sector. However, it is likely that a more powerful lobby will be at work here—one that will grossly inflate the perceived value of their work and shield it from outside intrusion.

He who makes the rules…..makes the rules.
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