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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

#461

Post by gameman144 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #275
lolinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.

Incompetent representation is grounds for a mistrial, or successful appeal.

The prosecution wants to win, but they'd prefer to only have to win once.

If you have to go back to trial, you've already showed your hand, and the defense (who is now competent) can adapt to it.

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

#462

Post by jedberg »

"The justice system moves swiftly now that they've abolished all lawyers!"

-- Doc Brown in 2015, Back to the Future

I look forward to the day when cases are argued on both sides by an AI to an AI judge. It should work about as well as Google customer service!

But seriously, having the AI do the arguing is silly. AI should be a tool. I see no issue using an AI to inform a lawyer who can use what it outputs to make their case stronger, but just using an AI seems fraught with peril.

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

#463

Post by dinkumthinkum »

deltarholamda wrote: post #236
tablespoon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no. And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice rec…

>The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system. Lawyers make la…

I think you are thinking the legal system simple and it is basically a jobs program for lawyers. I think that is a very simplistic and unrealistic notion of the legal system. I also don’t think many lawyers are squirming about socialism or whatever.

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

#464

Post by mountainb »

lolinder wrote: post #417
mountainb wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

If that's true, then it'll never get to the point that it would need to, and its reliability would always be too low to use.

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

#465

Post by dinkumthinkum »

deltarholamda wrote: post #271
tablespoon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail > That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system. > Lawyers m…

>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…

That’s not why we have a jury system.

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

#467

Post by gilleain »

ogogmad wrote: post #460
timerol wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of ADA_EXEMPT, IS_VEHICLE, or DISALLOW_IN_PARK can be easily formally defined. And the mere mention of "wheelchair" adds an additional ADA-related logic exemption. What about bicycles? Strollers? Unicycles? Shopping carts? Skateboards? And even if IS_VEHICLE was formally defined, that doesn't help, because the concept isn't reusable. It's perfectly normal for "No vehicles allowed in park" and "No vehicles allowe…

I don't know if I've misread some people here, but it's silly to insist that the law be a formal system. It's impossible. Common Law uses judicial precedent to fill in ambiguities as they turn into actual disputes. If you had to formally define everything, then a) it would run into the various Incompleteness Theorems in logic (like Goedel's) and the Principle of Explosion, so it would go hilariously wrong b) No law w…

Appropriately enough, Gödel had this very problem when getting US citizenship, where he tried to argue that the law had a logical problem:

"On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del#Princeton,_Ein...

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

#469

Post by dinkumthinkum »

ajmurmann wrote: post #242
lostlogin wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? I’d say that an industry with significant health, safety or financial risk should require regulation and licensing. Your example seems a bit crazy.

The funny thing is that doctors would be the canonical examples for most people. Yet, there is no license that stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery. What stops the pediatrician from performing brain surgery is that no hospital would hire them as a brain surgeon, no insurance would insure their brain surgery and if something goes wrong they'd likely face a lawsuit they couldn't win. Why is the system abl…

This is kind of an absurd example. The system is setup in such a way that such a person would be in enormous amounts of trouble even face criminal liability. They may not face a law called “practicing medicine without a license” but they would face negligent or other similarly severe charges. As well, the fact that this never, ever happens seems to indicate the current regulatory structure is enough for this.

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

#470

Post by giantg2 »

freejazz wrote: post #439
giantg2 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, in your software example those companies overwhelming rely on degrees to credentialize candidates regardless of actual skill. Licensing is merely a subset of the larger credentialing world. Even in your doctor example, the license is not the issue - board certification of a specialty would be the issue.

You misunderstand licensing. Licensing ensures a minimum of conduct and creates a standard for liability for falling below that level of conduct.

I know that perfectly well. That doesn't change what I've said as it applies to the examples above.
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