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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

#421

Post by dinkumthinkum »

phpisthebest wrote: post #375
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…

>>The legal profession is perhaps the closest one to computer programming There is a ton of people using ChatGPT for programming.... so much so that I wonder if we will have a crisis in skills as people forgo how to write code. sysadmin circles have tons people celebrating how they will not have to learn powershell now as an example

There’s a lot of people doing a big circle jerk over ChatGPT with wild ideas of singularity and oddly eagerly awaiting the end of white collar work. Whatever. I agree that programmers being obsessed with it can lead to skill atrophy. But, in reality, there are many people that are very technical and are not becoming reliant on these things for coding.

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

#422

Post by dragonwriter »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #46
dragonwriter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they just wanted to show the world their product was viable, why didn't they pay for a real lawyer who's down to their luck to read out the crap ChatGPT was spewing out so there wouldn't be any legal gray area? They tried that, but swung for the fences for publicity: they had a $1,000,000 offer to any attorney with a case pending before the Supreme Court to use it for oral argument. Up until they abandoned the w…

No, they didn't try "that". "That" is having a lawyer in some basic case do it. The supreme court idea was never going happen and they knew it.

> No, they didn't try "that".

In the the construction “they tried that, but... ”, the part after “but”, if it identifies an action by the actor and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is described by “that”. So, I'm not sure what you are arguing against here.

> The supreme court idea was never going happen and they knew it.

I don’t think they knew it, just as I don’t think the bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal (“sue in small claims court”, child custody, divorce) assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic. I think they jist took the path of boldly striding into a domain they didn’t understand but somehow thought that they could market “AI” for, and ran into unpleasant reality on multiple fronts, forcing not only their scheduled traffic court demo and their hoped-for Supreme Court demo to fail to materialize, but also several of their already-available legal-aid products to be pulled, so that they would focus exclusively on consumer assistance products without as much legal sensitivity.

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

#423

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#424

Post by torstenvl »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #394
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…

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.

Well, the problem is that the defendant has a right to competent representation, and ineffective assistance of counsel fails to fulfill that right.

(Your hypothetical includes a fine, so it isn't clear whether the offense in your hypothetical is one with, shall we say, enhanced sixth amendment protections under Gideon and progeny, or even one involving a criminal offense rather than a simple civil infraction, but...) in many cases lack of a competent attorney is considered structural error, meaning automatic reversal.

In practice, that means that judges (who are trying to prevent their decisions from being overturned) will gently correct defense counsel and guide them toward competence, something that frustrated me when I was a prosecutor but which the system relies upon.

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

#425

Post by dinkumthinkum »

winReInstall wrote: post #363
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…

Eh, what if it was trained on all the previous cases ever to have existed? I think it could be pretty good, as long as it detects novelty as a to flag and confirm error case.

It fails at determining if a number is prime and provides bogus arguments to such effect. You think it would make sense for this to argue complex legal cases with strategy? This isn’t Go or chess.

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

#426

Post by torstenvl »

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?

"Counsel, I'm unfamiliar with the case you've cited. Have you brought a copy for the court? No? How about a bench brief? Very well. I am going to excuse the panel for lunch and place the court in recess. Members of the jury, please return at 1:00. Counsel, please arrive with bench briefs including printouts of major cases at 12:30. Court stands in recess." bang

"All rise!"

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

#427

Post by mattwad »

phpisthebest wrote: post #375
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…

>>The legal profession is perhaps the closest one to computer programming There is a ton of people using ChatGPT for programming.... so much so that I wonder if we will have a crisis in skills as people forgo how to write code. sysadmin circles have tons people celebrating how they will not have to learn powershell now as an example

i use copilot every day, and it's never written more than one line at a time that didn't need adjusting. If you are letting an AI write code for you without knowing what it does, you should not be in programming. I would probably just fire someone if their response to me was ever "well the AI wrote that bit of code that deleted our DB, i didnt know what it did"

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

#428

Post by jwithington »

Has anyone who has covered this actually used DoNotPay?

It's just such a poor product. I'm biased towards being pro-AI lawyer, but there's no reason to think that an app that can't execute the basics will push the technological frontier of the legal field.

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

#429

Post by weatherlite »

eloff wrote: post #285
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…

I think you’re right here and it’s the same reason I see AI as a tool in the software profession. You can use it to speed up your work, but you have to have someone fully trained who can tell the difference between looks good but is wrong, versus is actually usable. I’ve been using copilot for half a year now and it’s helpful, but often wrong. I carefully verify anything it gives me before using it. I’ve had one bug…

> I’ve had one bug that made it to production where I think copilot inserted code that I didn’t notice and which slipped past code review

I'm not saying this is good but come on. Humans do that all the time, why aren't we so harsh on humans?

> I am not now, nor have I ever been afraid that AI is coming after my job

I am. This thing amazed me, and even if it won't be able to 100% replace humans (which I doubt), it can make juniors orders of magnitude more productive for example. This will be a complete disruption of the industry and doesn't bode well for salaries.

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

#430

Post by mattwad »

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…

It probably should not _replace_ a lawyer, though. Just enable a single lawyer to handle more cases
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