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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

#601

Post by nonrandomstring »

shrewduser wrote: post #582
tinsmith wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

i feel like lawyers will be able to legally keep AI out of their field for a while yet. they have the tools at their disposal to do so and a huge incentive. other fields like journalism not so much.

> i feel like lawyers will be able to legally keep AI out of their field for a while yet. they have the tools at their disposal to do so and a huge incentive, other fields like journalism not so much.

That was my initial response too.

Artists, programmers, musicians, teachers are threatened... but shrug and say "that's the future, what can you do". If lawyers feel "threatened" by AI, they get it shot down.

I suddenly have a newfound respect for lawyers :)

Yet if we think about it, we all have exactly the same tools at our disposal - which is just not playing that game. Difference is, while most professions have got used to rolling with whatever "progressive technology" is foisted on us, lawyers have a long tradition of caution and moderating external pressure to "modernise". I'm not sure Microsoft have much influence in the legal field.

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

#602

Post by dragonwriter »

freedomben wrote: post #544
thombat wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when appearing in court you're in real-time: you can't take 5 minutes to validate the AI output before passing it on. You can do that for your opening statements but once faced with the judge's rulings or cross-examination you'll be in the weeds.

Yeah that's fair, although if it was AI-assisted lawyer then presumably you'd have done the research ahead of time. But, for spontaneous stuff, you're totally right. My original statement was thinking about it as a "prep time" exercise, but spontaneous stuff would appear in court. Although, the human lawyer (who should still be simiarly prepared for court) would be there to handle those, possibly with some quick assi…

> if it was AI-assisted lawyer

If it was AI-assisted lawyer, it would be a whole different discussion. Aside from requiring a live feed of interactions to a remote system and other technical details, “lawyers using supportive tools while exercising their own judgement on behalf of their client” isn’t controversial the way marketing an automated system as, or as a substitute for, legal counsel and representation is.

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

#603

Post by gptgpp »

torstenvl wrote: post #424
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.

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...)…

Seems like the solution is clear then. If the judge gently corrects defense counsel and guides them towards competence, they can just do the same with AI. Then the company can use that data to improve it! Eventually it will be perfect with all the free labor from those judges.

>Judge: that case does not exist. Ask it about this case instead

>AI: I apologize for the mistake, that case is more applicable. blah blah blah. Hallucinates an incorrect conclusion and cites another hallucinated case to support it.

Judge: The actual conclusion to the case was this, and that other case also does not exist.

Isn't that the same thing? Seems fine to me, I know the legal system is already pretty overwhelmed but eventually it might get so good everyone could be adequately represented by a public defender.

Speaking of, I remember reading most poor people can only see the free lawyer they've been assigned for a couple minutes and they barely review the case? I don't understand how that is okay, as long as technically they're competent even if the lack of time makes them pretty ineffective...

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

#605

Post by vkou »

Maursault wrote: post #594

Bar associations have set themselves up to fail. Enroll the AI in law school, let it get a degree, and sit for the bar exam in every state. Problem solved. And then the bar associations can suck it.

And when the AI starts fabricating fictitious citations for cases, disbar it, and ban it and its developers from practicing law?

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

#606

Post by daveslash »

Maursault wrote: post #594

Bar associations have set themselves up to fail. Enroll the AI in law school, let it get a degree, and sit for the bar exam in every state. Problem solved. And then the bar associations can suck it.

Enroll the AI at law school and let it get a degree? Reminds me of a whimsical shower thought I had once.... Create a business that owns itself, and write an AI to run it. Owns its own bank accounts and everything. Maybe the business is just selling stickers online or something equally lightweight, but give it all the legal status of company. But a company with zero human owners or any human employees. Make it a rebuke of the "corporations are people" idea. Just a zombie out there selling products/services, and making money that no human can ever touch again....

If it sounds crazy/stupid, remember - I did say "whimsical shower thought" ;)

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

#607

Post by dragonwriter »

bluGill wrote: post #522
gamblor956 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Fact checking an AI is still massively easier than finding and reading all the precedent yourself.

Actually fact-checking an AI requires finding and reading all the precedent yourself to verify that the AI has both cited accurately and not missed contradictory precedent that is more relevant (whether newer, from a higher court, or more specifically on-point.)

If it has got an established track record, just as with a human assistant, you can make an informed decision about what corners you can afford to cut on that, but then you aren't really fact-checking it.

OTOH, an AI properly trained on one of the existing human-curated and annotated databases linking case law to issues and tracking which cases apply, overrule, or modify holdings from others might be extremely impressive—but those are likely to be expensive products tied to existing offerings from Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc.

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

#608

Post by OkayPhysicist »

bloak wrote: post #371
parsimo2010 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here (as with many disruptive tech companies), is the regulatory system. It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law. If DoNotPay isn't licensed to practice law in California, they can't do this. And unless they have a plan to either get licensed in many states, or somehow change the law, then their business model sucks. It sounds to me that they haven't actuall…

> It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law. Presumably that's in the USA, where all sorts of things require a licence. But what's the definition of "legal advice", I wonder? Can an unlicensed person dodge the law just by saying "this is not legal advice" while advising someone how to draft a contract or what to say in court and charging for that advice? If you want an…

The distinction you're looking for is "legal advice" vs. "legal information". The tricky thing is that when a lawyer gives you legal advice, they are taking legal responsibility for that advice to be good.

There's a guide for avoiding illegally giving legal advice for California court clerks [0] that might help clarify what information can be given without qualifying as advice.

[0] https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/mayihelpyou.pdf

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

#609

Post by gptgpp »

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 agree, but it doesn't have to be that way. I've been learning a couple new languages and frameworks lately and found it really accelerates my learning, increases enjoyment, and is good at explaining the silly mistakes that I make.

So it can enhance skills just as much as it can atrophy them.

And I'm okay with some skills atrophying... I hate writing regular expressions, but they're so useful for some situations. It's a shame chatGPT fails so hard at them, otherwise I would be content to never use a regex again.

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

#610

Post by AnimalMuppet »

enoch2090 wrote: post #575
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…

> 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. > Defendant (as dictated by AI): Yes, you are right, there was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978.

At which point you have seriously annoyed the judge, and made him/her/justice-of-other-gender scrutinize your points much more skeptically.
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