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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

#611

Post by OkayPhysicist »

intrasight wrote: post #596
Calavar wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lots of legal software is marketed and sold.

And legal software is very, very careful to avoid constituting legal advice, as opposed to merely legal information.

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

#612

Post by dragonwriter »

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...

> If it is never pulling from a source, then why is it able to provide citations?

If you have the training set, and models that summarize text and/or assess similarity, and some basic search engine style tools to reduce or prioritize the problem space, it seems intuitively possible to synthesize probably-credible citations from a draft response without the response being drawn from citations the way a human author would.

Kind of a variant of how plagiarism detection works.

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

#613

Post by AnimalMuppet »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #397

As the Opening Arguments podcast (one of the two hosts is a lawyer) said: If as a lawyer you do what was asked - just parrot what an AI tells you to parrot, you're going to get sanctioned and possibly disbarred. As a lawyer you are responsible for what you say and argue, and if you argue something that you know to be false, you're in violation of the ethics standards; just about every bar association lists that as sa…

Your footnote: A judge should take that argument seriously, and therefore disbar him because he's old and self-admittedly doesn't know what he's doing.

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

#614

Post by OkayPhysicist »

intrasight wrote: post #595
danShumway wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automating boilerplate seems like a great use for AI if you can then have someone go over the writing and check that it's accurate. I'd prefer that the boilerplate actually be reduced instead, but... I don't have any issue with someone using AI to target tasks that are essentially copy-paste operations anyway. I think this was kind of different. > If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one…

This is different from self-driving or software dev apps. Law is different because the bar has a legally enforced monopoly on doing legal work. DoNotPay was being threatened. But they weren't practicing law - they were just providing legal tools. My point is that were in uncharted legal territory. Perhaps ask the AI what it thinks ;)

Actually, by telling a client what specific arguments to make in court, they were giving big-L Legal Advice, and thus literally practicing law.

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

#615

Post by rideontime »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #501

Honestly I think this guy was super clever. It was abundantly clear to anyone thinking about this that there was no way this ploy would work. But he got pretty big on Twitter, is getting all of this press, and has now built up awareness of his startup which is doing a far saner and less ambitious task incredible publicity which otherwise he would've had a hard time getting.

He seems to have shut down a lot of his startup's services due to the attention he's been getting: https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648

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

#616

Post by OkayPhysicist »

cwkoss wrote: post #527
marmetio wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

A book gives legal information, not specific to a certain circumstance or case. If your chatbot is considering the specifics of a case before advising on a course of action, it's probably giving legal advice.

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

#617

Post by rideontime »

legitster wrote: post #515

> Leah Wilson, the State Bar of California's executive director, told NPR that there has been a recent surge in poor-quality legal representation that has emerged to fill a void in affordable legal advice. > "In 2023, we are seeing well-funded, unregulated providers rushing into the market for low-cost legal representation, raising questions again about whether and how these services should be regulated," Wilson said…

The solution certainly isn't to allow charlatans to exploit those of lesser means.

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

#618

Post by OkayPhysicist »

marmetio wrote: post #572
cwkoss wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you still referring to the scenario from the article, or a different one where it's a resource you use outside of court? > Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. Also, probably wouldn't matter. The interactive human-ish-like nature might cross the l…

By providing the words to say and arguments to make to the court, in response to a specific case or circumstance, DoNotPay was giving protected "legal advice" as opposed "legal information". There is ambiguity to find between legal advice and legal information, but that isn't.

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

#620

Post by jamesdwilson »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #562
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...

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.

thanks very much for this insightful response. i haven't heard this perspective before but it makes sense.
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