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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

#411

Post by NikolaNovak »

phpisthebest wrote: post #379
rhino369 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. Because you have to apply the law to fact and facts lack mathematical precision. "No vehicles in the park" would require someone to categorize everything in the world into vehicle or !vehicle. Does a wheel chair count? It's easier to lay out the principle and let judges determine edge cases as they play out.

Even you example is more precise that most laws. For example Indiana recently changed their Turn signal law from "Must put in on 300 feet before a lane change" to "Must signal in a reasonable time" WTF is a reasonable time... well what ever time the cop, judge, or prosecutors says it is

Right.

The programmer in me fumes at that imprecision.

The human in me says "thank God". Because there a myriad valid times you cannot turn on signal 300ft before lane change, but you should always do it in reasonable time :)

If I turn on a new street and there's a car parked 200ft down the lane or if a kid jumps on the road or if I become aware of an obstacle or a car cuts me off or I want to give somebody room at a merge etc etc... I may not be able to do it in 300ft but I should still try to do it in reasonable time.

There's no "winning". Overly precise is inhumane in some scenarios, Overly vague is inhumane in others.

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

#412

Post by freejazz »

ethanbond wrote: post #338
notahacker wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, not contesting the ticket is likely to be a better option than delegating your chances of not being convicted of contempt of court or perjury to the truthfulness and legal understanding of an LLM...

Sure if your objective is to minimize your own personal exposure. If your goal is to push toward a world where poor folks aren’t coerced into not contesting their tickets because they can’t afford to go to court or get representation, then maybe it is a good option.

This is a false dichotomy that you are making up in order to politically justify your narrative that is otherwise completely made up nonsense best described as legal malpractice.

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

#413

Post by dinkumthinkum »

barbazoo wrote: post #398
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here. > 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. Case closed, here's your fine. Next time please be more careful picking the lawyer.

Do judges know about all prior cases or do they check when they hear one referenced? It feels like this could easily slip through, no?

That’s not how the legal system works. You aren’t slipping anything through. Either the judge knows the case, they don’t know all the cases, or the judge will research or clerks will research and you will be sanctioned if you try to do so thing unethical.

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

#414

Post by wpietri »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #397

As the Opening Arguments podcast (one of the two hosts is a lawyer) said: If as a lawyer you do what was asked - just parrot what an AI tells you to parrot, you're going to get sanctioned and possibly disbarred. As a lawyer you are responsible for what you say and argue, and if you argue something that you know to be false, you're in violation of the ethics standards; just about every bar association lists that as sa…

> So far __ChatGPT got it wrong every time__.

The first wave of ChatGPT stories were all "amazing, wonderful, humanity is basically obsolete". But now that people have had a little time, I'm seeing a ton of examples where people are realizing that ChatGPT sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but actually doesn't know anything.

We know that humans are easily fooled by glib confidence; we can all think of politicians who have succeeded that way. But it sounds like ChatGPT's real innovation is something that produces synthetic bullshit. And here I'm using Frankfurt's definition, "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

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

#415

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

barbazoo wrote: post #398
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here. > 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. Case closed, here's your fine. Next time please be more careful picking the lawyer.

Do judges know about all prior cases or do they check when they hear one referenced? It feels like this could easily slip through, no?

IANAL, but I'd think in this case this is prosecutor's job.

Also, the original post is about the traffic ticket. I'm pretty sure if the judge hears a reference to something he had never heard before, he'll be like "huh? wtf?"

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

#416

Post by freejazz »

ethanbond wrote: post #362
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> goal is to push toward a world where poor folks aren’t coerced into not contesting their tickets Invest in a company doing this properly and not pushing half-baked frauds into the world. Supervised learning, mock trials. You’re proposing turning those poor folk into Guinea pigs, gambling with their freedom from afar.

This company has been doing this stuff for years . Yes this is a big step forward but it’s not from zero, as you’re suggesting. What makes you think they haven’t been doing mock trials and tons of supervised learning? And no, I’m not. I don’t think Defendant Zero (or one, or two, or 100) should be people whose lives would be seriously affected by errors. I’m pretty sure DNP doesn’t either.

It's not a licensed attorney.. it can't be disbarred.. it has no legal duties to its clients. What don't you get??

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

#417

Post by lolinder »

mountainb wrote: post #402
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…

What's interesting is that sometimes it does a great job at something like telling you the holdings of a case, but then other times it gives you a completely incorrect response. If you ask it for things like "the X factor test from Johnson v. Smith" sometimes it will dutifully report the correct test in bullets, but other times will say the completely wrong thing. The issue I think is that it's pulling from too many…

> The issue I think is that it's pulling from too many sources. There are plenty of sources that are pretty machine readable that will give it good answers. There's a lot of training that can be eked out from the legal databases that already exist that could make it a lot better. If it takes in too much information from too many sources, it tends to get garbled.

No, this is a common misunderstanding about the way these things work. A LLM is not really pulling from any sources specifically. It has no concept of a source. It has a bunch of weights that were trained to predict the next likely word, and those weights were tuned by feeding in a large amount of text from the internet.

Improving the quality of the sources used to train the weights would likely help, but would not solve the fundamental problem that this isn't actually a lossless knowledge compression algorithm. It's a statistical machine designed to guess the next word. That makes it fundamentally non-deterministic and unsuitable for any task where factual correctness matters (and there's no knowledgeable human in the loop to issue corrections).

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

#418

Post by freejazz »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #365
freejazz wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

So if a chat program can pass the bar exam, it's okay? Because I would bet that if a program can represent someone semi-competently in court, passing the bar exam which needs an objective marking criterion would be trivial by comparison.

Cart before the horse... you have to pass the bar before you get the chance to represent someone semi-competently in court. Generally, lawyers have 5 years of experience before they are considered competent enough to be semi-competently represent someone in court.

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

#419

Post by _aleph2c_ »

phpisthebest wrote: post #379
rhino369 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff. Because you have to apply the law to fact and facts lack mathematical precision. "No vehicles in the park" would require someone to categorize everything in the world into vehicle or !vehicle. Does a wheel chair count? It's easier to lay out the principle and let judges determine edge cases as they play out.

Even you example is more precise that most laws. For example Indiana recently changed their Turn signal law from "Must put in on 300 feet before a lane change" to "Must signal in a reasonable time" WTF is a reasonable time... well what ever time the cop, judge, or prosecutors says it is

It doesn't have to be precise. The founder should wear his own glasses, go to court to defend himself and use a fusion technique: have a lawyer and his AI both reach through his glasses. If he loses, he says, "we have a bit of work to do", if he wins, he wins. Either way, great publicity.

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

#420

Post by weatherlite »

codingdave wrote: post #393
weatherlite wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true anymore.

How would they be able to parse facts from fiction? Just because something is online does not mean it is true.

It's not like humans are great at parsing facts from fictions ... how do humans do it?
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