Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 708 posts

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

#561

Post by tinsmith »

danShumway wrote: post #503
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…

> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely…

> they felt ... threatened

I'm going to sit on that particular hill and see what happens. Even if DoNotPay's AI is not ready to do the job, the idea that AI could one day argue the law by focusing on logic and precedent instead of circumstance and interpretation is exceedingly threatening to a lawyer's career. No offense intended to the lawyers out there, of course. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel a bit fidgity over this, too.

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

#562

Post by ascagnel_ »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #490
lolinder wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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...

The example you give isn't necessarily a valid one. You're asking for a specific piece of knowable, measurable data -- one that has a single right answer and many wrong answers. Legal questions may have conflicting answers, they may have answers that are correct in one venue but not in another, etc., I have't yet seen any examples of an AI drawing the distinctions necessary for those situations.

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

#563

Post by deltarholamda »

eouwt wrote: post #444
deltarholamda wrote: post #236

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 make la…

>> Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly Really? In every country I've live in, politicians write laws, judges set precedents, and lawyers only get to make arguments. True, the first two are often & always former lawyers, but that seems as reasonable as how doctors get to determine best medical practice.

> True, the first two are often & always former lawyers

You answered your own "Really?" question.

And doctors don't determine best medical practices. Lawyers also do that, albeit indirectly through malpractice lawsuits. Thus the "best medical practices" are all CYA maneuvers.

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

#564

Post by dragonwriter »

markogrady wrote: post #132

The HMCTS held a hackathon for the future tech in the UK court system a few years ago. The judges were people like the CEO of the courts, they also had lord chief justice. There were all sorts of firms like Linklaters, Pinsent Mason and Deloitte. We won with a simple Alexa lawyer that was to help poor rental tenants. It generated documents to send a landlord and possible legal advice. The idea was specifically for pe…

> Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI?

I doubt it; AI will be a force multiplier from law school on into practice. More value will mean more demand at all experience levels.

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

#565

Post by PostOnce »

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 AI is also _deceptively_ "right". For example, it will cite precedent that has since been superseded.

A non-lawyer representing themselves in a criminal case would overlook that, make a bad/wrong/misinformed argument, and go to jail.

In other fields, it'll lie to you about the thickness of steel pipe required to transport water at a certain pressure, it'll refer to programming libraries that don't exist, and it'll claim something impossible in one breath and happily explain it as fact in the next.

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

#566

Post by giantg2 »

freejazz wrote: post #523
giantg2 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A license is a credential.

Not all credentials are licenses, but all licenses are credentials.

You can look up some definitions if you want. I'm done with this conversation as you are so set on arguing a tangent without an open mind.

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

#567

Post by bostonsre »

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…

In the court itself there would definitely be no way to trust them right now, but I could see AI being a useful research tool for cases. It could find patterns and suggest cases for someone that is qualified to look further into. No idea how hard it is for lawyers to find relevant cases now, but seems like it could be a tough problem.

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

#568

Post by gunshai »

elicksaur wrote: post #512
gunshai wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, bad. I may also disagree with some of the tactics DoNotPay used to represent themselves. But in a larger sense Lawyers cost money a lot of money. it's wonderful living in a time where the cost of filing suits is so low compared to defending against said suits. AI lawyers can help lower those barriers to entry. the court in question is fucking traffic court. please lower the barrier to entry for defense and allow…

Yeah, I agree with basically everything you’ve said, but the standard of AI legal advice should be at least the standard of services required by current attorney regulations. They should probably be higher even. It is certainly likely that in the future, technology can provide that level of quality at a massive, extremely cost effective scale, but ChatGPT and DoNotPay is not that.

No direct complaint here, other than some president has to be set at some point.

Someone will have to take the initial risk. ChatGPT like AI may not be "the thing" but for some in this forum to be afraid of AI defense attorney is completely missing the forest through the trees.

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

#569

Post by cwkoss »

yamtaddle wrote: post #537
cwkoss wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Can a lawyer get away with doing the same thing if, say, they provide all their advice as .epub files? "Why, your honor, these were merely books..." [EDIT] That is, would they be immune from e.g. malpractice if they did this so they "weren't representing" the defendant?

If the book was written about a particular case, that seems like specific legal advice.

If the book was a generalized "choose your own adventure" where you compose a sensible legal argument from selecting a particular template and filling it in with relevant data - use of the book essentially lets the user find the pre-existing legal advice that is relevant to their situation.

Chatbots as a system are arguably a lot more like the latter than the former - its a tool that someone can use to 'legal advise' themselves.

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

#570

Post by Calavar »

intrasight wrote: post #542
danShumway wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely…

From what I've read recently, the legal profession is the one most at risk of adverse financial effects from AI. Not the court appearances nor the specialized work. But the run-of-the-mill boilerplate legal writing that is the bread and butter profit center of most first. You bet they are threatened and will push back. Now the question is this. If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one san…

> Now the question is this. If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one sanction an AI?

As far as I'm aware, no LLM has reached sentience and started taking on projects of its own volition. So it's easy - you sanction whoever ran the software for an illegal purpose or whoever marketed and sold the software for an illegal purpose.

Post reply on HN