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

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

#291

Post by dogleash »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #181

There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers, doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and consultants are going to face some competition from tools like this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even a first opinion. Whether that's misguided or not is not the question. The only question is how good/valuable the AI ad…

>There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers, doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and consultants are going to face some competition from tools like this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even a first opinion.

What are you on about? This has been ongoing for decades.

You're talking down to hypothetical doctors as if doctors don't already deal with the phenomenon of people self-diagnosing from the internet. We as humanity already know the benefits and drawbacks of Dr. Google.

The only thing AI does that search engines don't, is it takes the pile of links a search engine would find and synthesizes it into a tailored piece of text designed to sound topical and authoritative. And delivers it to people who already believe too much of the shit they read on the internet.

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

#292

Post by fallingknife »

lolinder wrote: post #270
gfodor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the case, the lawyers should have nothing to fear, and the plaintiff nothing to lose but a parking ticket. I say we stop arguing and run the experiment.

Non-lawyers aren't banned from giving legal advice because lawyers are trying to protect their jobs, they're banned from giving legal advice because they're likely to be bad at it, and the people who take their advice are likely to be hurt. Yes, in this case, it would just be a parking ticket, but the legal system runs on precedent and it's safer to hold a strict line than to create a fuzzy "well, it depends on how m…

They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at people who can't, for now at least.

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

#294

Post by ethanbond »

lolinder wrote: post #274
ethanbond wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing. It really doesn’t strike me as true that law requires absolute precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far) arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that shatter credibility, but that’s very different from “get one thing wrong and the system doesn’t work at all or works in wildly…

There are also many adjacent algorithms that could solve the same problem, but you still need to execute the algorithm correctly. LLMs are not ready for unsupervised use in any domain outside of curiosity, and what DoNotPay is proposing would be to let one roam free in a courtroom. I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting…

That’s nowhere near analogous because between every working algorithm are massive gulfs of syntactic and semantic failure zones. This is not the case with human language, which is the whole power of both language production and language interpretation.

Is it more problematic than this person 1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and disinterested public defender?

I’m not convinced.

The idea that we need to wait to do this stuff until the people whose profession is under threat give “permission” is dismissible on its face and is exactly why we should be doing this is as quickly as possible. For what it’s worth, I mostly agree with you: I’m doubtful the technology is there yet. But that’s a call for each defendant to make in each new case and so long as they’re of sound mind, they should be free to pick whatever legal counsel they want.

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

#296

Post by deltarholamda »

tablespoon wrote: post #273
deltarholamda wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered? The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making even a simple Windows application can be very complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows itself? Can you…

> I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered? I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here. > The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they though…

>I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here

Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!"

My point was that I think I do understand what the system does, and what it does is (largely) provide lots of work for people in the legal system. You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.

In other industries we know this as regulatory capture. This is just regulatory capture of the regulatory system.

>Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good.

Nothing is an unalloyed good. To bolster your example, OJ got to walk as well. This is why there is an entire industry built up around just the jury selection process.

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

#297

Post by ravenstine »

pintxo wrote: post #268

Absolute precision? Have you read any law lately? Legal texts are (to me) surprisingly imprecise. One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. I mean, comma/and/or separated lists in full text? Not even parenthesis? That’s not precision.

Even most software isn't intended to be absolutely precise, but rather to be precise enough for a given task.

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

#298

Post by freejazz »

ethanbond wrote: post #261
lolinder wrote: post #246

This company is either run by someone who doesn't understand the tech or is willfully fraudulent. ChatGPT and company are far from good enough to be entrusted with law. Having interacted extensively with modern LLMs, I absolutely know something like this would happen: > Defendant (as dictated by AI): The Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Smith in 1978... > Judge: There was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978. LLMs hallu…

DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing. It really doesn’t strike me as true that law requires absolute precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far) arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that shatter credibility, but that’s very different from “get one thing wrong and the system doesn’t work at all or works in wildly…

"DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing."

What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal. It's the unlicensed practice of law.

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

pintxo wrote: post #268

Absolute precision? Have you read any law lately? Legal texts are (to me) surprisingly imprecise. One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. I mean, comma/and/or separated lists in full text? Not even parenthesis? That’s not precision.

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by freejazz »

ethanbond wrote: post #294
lolinder wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also many adjacent algorithms that could solve the same problem, but you still need to execute the algorithm correctly. LLMs are not ready for unsupervised use in any domain outside of curiosity, and what DoNotPay is proposing would be to let one roam free in a courtroom. I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting…

That’s nowhere near analogous because between every working algorithm are massive gulfs of syntactic and semantic failure zones. This is not the case with human language, which is the whole power of both language production and language interpretation. Is it more problematic than this person 1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and disinter…

"I’m not convinced."

Yeah, no surprise. You seem completely unreasonable if you posit only these three options for freakin' traffic court...

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