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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

#331

Post by runarberg »

ALittleLight wrote: post #128
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…

The paper says the professors have a median of 200 comparisons each. It also says they only used 2 models because using more models would require more comparisons and they selected Google models because Google was branded/advertised as being education focused. When you see other models show up elsewhere, that's because they extended the main idea to other models but using LLMs to judge instead of human professors.

I think it is more likely that they selected Gemini because the lead author is a fellow at an institute which receives a lot of their funding from Google.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#332

Post by adampunk »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #190
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.

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 doesn't even need to 'improve' at the same rate to have extraordinary impact in society. Even if the frontier models stayed roughly the same in cost and capability for just 1-2 years, the harnesses and processes built around them would mature. We have not yet metabolized these models. Frankly, a lot of this feels like late 80s early 90s complaints about how office computerization wasn't happening yet--it was, just not at the rate promised by the companies selling computers to businesses. We don't look back at those people in the 80s saying that paper was here to stay as visionaries just because they noticed that propaganda temporarily outran the business environment.

I just wish people would take a step back and think about the timescales here. Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners was in 2019. Here we are seven years later and LOOK AROUND. The landscape is unrecognizable. It's worth thinking about who, in those seven years, had an accurate estimate of the future and whose estimate fundamentally failed. And just as it is valuable to note where propaganda about progress speeds past where we are, we should remember that it is costless to announce that at some unspecified future time all of this will settle down and things will go back to the way they were.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#334

Post by zuzululu »

causal wrote: post #216
zuzululu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Did you not read the article ? Where does it talk about software development/engineering?

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#335

Post by [deleted] »

ambicapter wrote: post #310
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.

Autopilots have been able to land planes for years (decades?), and yet they still don't land passengers planes at any increased rate.

[deleted]

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#336

Post by [deleted] »

taco_emoji wrote: post #304
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.

I will never trust an AI as much as a person

[deleted]

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#337

Post by [deleted] »

ambicapter wrote: post #310
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.

Autopilots have been able to land planes for years (decades?), and yet they still don't land passengers planes at any increased rate.

[deleted]

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#338

Post by vonunov »

thewebguyd wrote: post #15
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 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…

> sysadmin

Another domain where LLMs are very effective at confidently leading people down a messy path. I have a roommate using LLMs to guide him through setting up some ollama stuff in my WSL (I happen to have the half-decent GPU here) and after multiple rounds of the bot trying to get him to do things that were redundant if not in the wrong direction entirely (and vaguely insulting as a matter of course), I had to write "ground truths" along these lines, and probably more as I find them:

  We are using systemd. ~/.bashrc or similar dotfiles should not be used to start services/processes automatically. Do not "sudo" anything in ~/.bashrc.
[Yes, it did that]

  A systemd service should be created for any processes/services that need to run automatically and persistently. The current output of `systemctl list-unit-files | grep enabled` is available at [ . . . ]  

  sshd is already enabled + running and listening on 0.0.0.0:22 and [::]:22. ~/.ssh perms are already 700 and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys perms are already 600. Public key authentication is already enabled in sshd and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys already contains pubkeys ENDING as follows: . . . 

  tailscaled is already enabled + running; the tailscale address for [host] is [addr]

  It is not necessary to fix connectivity to any 192.168.0.0/16 ; tailscale interface should be used for any traffic to [host] or other hosts involved in the project; hosts/nodes lacking tailscale interface should be assigned one
[roommate + bot spent 45 minutes on trying to configure their way through NAT when not having to do that is almost the entire point of tailscale. It was just (essentially) like, "You're absolutely right. We have tailscale set up, so we don't need to be able to ssh to that other interface at all. Not troubleshooting that would have saved 45 whole minutes. Oh well, now what?"]

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not inclined to trust the judgment of something that can't keep this kind of thing straight, which I know is to some degree a matter of having all the needed info in the context window. But maybe it would be able to do that if it didn't waste tokens telling me to cd into the same directory that I'm already in every 2 minutes, or chmod .ssh/ again, or (when it really needs to burn some tokens) blow away the .venv and pull a bunch of modules again just to "start clean".

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#339

Post by citizenpaul »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #20
citizenpaul wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want human connection the legal system is not where you are going to find it, period. I don't think there will be any such market for "non ai" law. If I'm involved with the legal system I just want out as quick as possible as cheap as possible.

Bad legal advice will keep you dealing with the legal system for much longer and at much greater cost. Something being cheap and quick upfront doesn't mean it will be cheap and quick by the end of the process.

IANAL.

The legals system is structurally based around manipulating text and its relations. It seems to me that the entire legal industry is the ideal use case for LLM's to take over.

Of course the legal system can gatekeep forever by design.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#340

Post by runarberg »

keeda wrote: post #154
runarberg wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study was conducted by Stanford’s HAI institute, which receives heavy funding from Google (how much I couldn’t find because they don‘t publish their donations in a place I could find it; but I suspect it is alot). And the authors did not declare a non-conflict of interest at the end of the paper.

Wait, where are you seeing the link to HAI? TFA mentions something called "liftlab" which seems to be something under Stanford Law School and separate from HAI. The study has more than a dozen authors from as many different universities but HAI is not mentioned.

You are right, this study was technically conducted by The Stanford Law AI Initiative which is co-chaired by Julian Nyarko who is also a senior fellow at HAI, and is also the lead author of this study.

This is enough of an association to claim a conflict of interest between the study authors and Google. But I wanted to go further and see if The Stanford Law AI Initiative had been given a research grant from HAI. So I spent way to long on both of their websites to find a list of research grants either awarded by HAI or received by Stanford Law AI Initiative. But no such luck. Despite HAI having a page dedicated to Centers and Labs, and to Research partners, and despite claiming 500+ research funded, they only list like 6 organizations each, and then link to each other in their “See More” button below.

I have a feeling I will have to browse through some tax filing papers to find the truth here. But I am not a journalist, so I am not gonna. I am simply gonna leave it at the obvious associations involved here. And maybe issue a correction: “conducted by a senior fellow at HAI”

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