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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

#521

Post by treis »

ufmace wrote: post #506
jchw wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation, and their formulaic nature justified and equally formulaic response, or something to that effect. Whether the LLM was actually going to output answers directly, or just be used to drive a behavior tree or something like that, is a question…

Thinking about how the problem would "elegantly solve itself" seems to illustrate the issue. Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a chance to fix it. A failure mode of jail time…

It's probably better than the existing alternative. Which is roughly plead guilty because you don't have money to pay a lawyer. Or don't sue someone because you don't have money to pay a lawyer.

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

#522

Post by bluGill »

gamblor956 wrote: post #517
freedomben wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the AI cites a non-existent precedent, there's literally no way to incorporate that error back into the AI because there's no factual underlying model against which to check the AI's output--unless you had an actual lawyer checking it, in which case, what's the point of the AI? IANAL, but I would bet the level of effort to fact check an AI's output would be orders of magnitude lower than researching and building…

You would lose that bet. Fact-checking nonsensical output would take a lot longer than researching a single body of law, which you can generally do by just looking up a recent case on the matter. You don't need to check every cite; that will have been done for you by the lawyers and judges involved in that case. But checking every cite in an AI's output: many of those citations won't exist, and for the ones that do,…

Fact checking an AI is still massively easier than finding and reading all the precedent yourself. Real lawyers of course already know the important precedent in the areas they deal in, and they still have teams behind the scene to search out more that might apply, and then only read the ones the team says look important.

Of course there could be a difference between an reading all the cases an AI says are important and actually finding the important cases including ones the AI didn't point you at. However this is not what the bet was about.

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

#523

Post by freejazz »

giantg2 wrote: post #514
freejazz wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's separate from having your license. You don't need to be employed by a law firm to be a licensed atty

What's your point here? You still need a license.

My point? That credentials are separate from the license and aren't part of the same thing. That's why many professions don't have licensing. They serve completely different purposes.

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

#525

Post by gamblor956 »

ethanbond wrote: post #306
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.

Their track record? Seems like this is the first you’re hearing of them, but this is just the latest (and yes, most ambitious) experiment. They’ve been successfully using technology to help normal people defeat abusive systems built by “the professions” for years.

Most people successfully contest traffic tickets by just showing up to traffic court. It really is that easy.

So, DoNotPay is basically just a scam taking money from people without providing anything of value.

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

#526

Post by bluGill »

freejazz wrote: post #408
ethanbond wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the others? If you contest a ticket, you either have representation or you don’t. You can either afford good representation or you cannot.

Traffic court attorneys aren't expensive. They are actually incredibly cheap. There's also no public defenders in US traffic courts at least.

Last time I checked with a lawyer about a traffic ticket he told me that it wasn't worth his time to go to court (this was the school provided free legal service and the case was just a burnt headlight that I didn't have verified fixed within a week, you decide if he should have gone to court with me or if he would have for a more complex case), but I was instructed how to present my case. I got my fine reduced at least, which was important as a student paying my own way (I'm one of the last to pay for college just by working jobs between class, so this was important)

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

#527

Post by cwkoss »

marmetio wrote: post #509
jchw wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation, and their formulaic nature justified and equally formulaic response, or something to that effect. Whether the LLM was actually going to output answers directly, or just be used to drive a behavior tree or something like that, is a question…

The specific scenario doesn't matter. It's illegal to represent someone else in court if you're not a lawyer. There are a lot of things that you can't get a second chance at if your lawyer messes up that suing them can't fix. Lawyers and judges also negotiate, which a machine can't do because nobody feels an obligation to cut them some slack. Also now you're tainting case law with machine-generated garbage. Everythin…

If you can sell a book that helps teach someone how to represent themselves, why can't you sell a person access to a robot that helps teach them how to represent themselves?

Why is the robot not "speech"?

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

#528

Post by anotherman554 »

joshuaheard wrote: post #387

"Unauthorized practice of law" only applies to people, not tools. AI is a tool. DoNotPay was not selling legal advice, only a tool to understand law. It is no different if they were selling a code book, or other text that the defendant uses himself. I think the real fear is that AI will supplant the entire legal profession. The legal profession went through a similar struggle when Nolo published software that could d…

You are making the assumption that a company advertising a robo lawyer isn't engaged in unauthorized practice of law, which is rather odd since I bet the Nolo books don't hold themselves out as a lawyer, robo or otherwise.

You are also making the assumption any tool is allowed in a courtroom, which is obviously not correct. You wouldn't be able to use a nolo book while testifying what you witnessed at a crime scene, either.

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

#529

Post by freejazz »

bluGill wrote: post #526
freejazz wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic court attorneys aren't expensive. They are actually incredibly cheap. There's also no public defenders in US traffic courts at least.

Last time I checked with a lawyer about a traffic ticket he told me that it wasn't worth his time to go to court (this was the school provided free legal service and the case was just a burnt headlight that I didn't have verified fixed within a week, you decide if he should have gone to court with me or if he would have for a more complex case), but I was instructed how to present my case. I got my fine reduced at le…

Yeah, that's because he's an attorney that gets paid a lot. go to the traffic court and you'll find the ones that don't get paid a lot. That's why they are hanging out in traffic court representing litigants there.

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

#530

Post by mountainb »

retrac wrote: post #516
jamesdwilson wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is never pulling from a source, then why is it able to provide citations? check the chat bot on you.com: https://you.com/search?q=list%20top%205%20best%20selling%20c...

One useful way to think of language models is that they are statistical completion engines. It attempts to create a completion to the prompt, and then evaluates the likelihood, in a statistical sense, that the completion would follow the prompt, based on the patterns in the training data. A citation in legalese is very common. A citation that is similar or identical to actual citations, in similar contexts, is theref…

This explains some of the particular errors that I've seen when poking and prodding it on complex legal questions and in trying to get it to brief cases.
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