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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

#631

Post by jacobsenscott »

jchw wrote: post #478
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…

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…

DoNotPay exists because AI vaporware is the new crypto vaporware, which was the new IoT vaporware, which was the new Web2 vaporware, and so on. Build a "product" on AI and you get (in this case) $28 million in funding. Pull stunts like this to generate a little buzz for the next round of funding. Then bail out with your golden parachute. Now you have experience founding a startup - do it again for $50 million.

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

#632

Post by burkaman »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #585
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…

That's hilarious, watch some of the trails on courtTV on youtube. The trials are are as culturally biased as you can get. And these ones are the ones we get to see. Judges are not some logical Spock! Free of influence, politics, and current group think. But people who think about their careers, public opinion and know who pays their paycheck. And these are the the competent ones. I remember judge Judy proclaiming "If…

Court TV is not real court and is not anything like real court.

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

#633

Post by chrsig »

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…

> LLMs hallucinate, and there is absolutely no space for hallucination in a court of law.

Well, _someone_ doesn't have enough schizophrenia in their life.

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

#634

Post by samtp »

freitzkriesler wrote: post #626
samtp wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment seems to be completely at odds with your first comment.

Mate I'm not stupid. It was a proof of concept and even if the end result was going to be a spectacular failure, it doesn't exclude the fact that the bar associations are desperately trying to fight this tooth and nail. Learn to read between the lines, not everything is an IDE.

My point is you're ignoring the fact that the bar association has a distinct interest in having the courts run smoothly and making sure lawyers in court are competent. So it is highly in their interest for a courtroom to not become a mockery because of a chatbot.

Not everything associations like the bar does is in bad faith or contrary to the public's interest.

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

#635

Post by HillRat »

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…

> An AI is not a person, and therefore can't be sanctioned for practicing law - my take anyway.

"Personhood" in a legal sense doesn't necessarily mean a natural person. In this case, the company behind it is a person and is practicing law (so no pro se litigant using the company to generate legal arguments). In addition, if you want something entered into court, you need a (natural person) lawyer to do it, who has a binding ethical duty to supervise the work of his or her subordinates. Blindly dumping AI-generated work product into open court is about as clear-cut an ethical violation as you can find.

To your larger point, law firms would love to automate a bunch of paralegal and associate-level work; I've been involved in some earlier efforts to do things like automated deposition analysis, and there's plenty of precedent in the way the legal profession jumped on shepardizing tools to rapidly cite cases. Increased productivity isn't going to be reflected by partners earning any less, after all.

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

#636

Post by marmetio »

john_the_writer wrote: post #622
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…

The tricky bit about your comment. "If you're not a lawyer." In this case who's the "You're".

Not tricky at all. If someone is receiving counsel, then someone is giving counsel. Hiding behind a machine adds a pretty minor extra step to identifying the culprits, but does not create ambiguity over whether they are culpable.

On the other hand, here's a lawyer who thinks it would not count as legal representation, but hasn't seen the arguments made against it yet. Food for thought.

https://youtu.be/r-gvArVKfUM

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

#637

Post by dukeofdoom »

burkaman wrote: post #632
dukeofdoom wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hilarious, watch some of the trails on courtTV on youtube. The trials are are as culturally biased as you can get. And these ones are the ones we get to see. Judges are not some logical Spock! Free of influence, politics, and current group think. But people who think about their careers, public opinion and know who pays their paycheck. And these are the the competent ones. I remember judge Judy proclaiming "If…

Court TV is not real court and is not anything like real court.

The TV one wasn't, but the youtube one actually it is, https://www.youtube.com/c/courttv

And judges as a group are some of the most deferential to authority people you can get.

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

#638

Post by dragonwriter »

john_the_writer wrote: post #630
dragonwriter wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What do you mean "finding"? The AI would just return links or raw text of the cases. Reading the findings would be the same as reading any precedence. But the AI could weight the results, and you'd only have to read the high scoring results. If the AI got it wrong, you'd just refine the search and the AI would be trained. To the cost. If it removed the need for one legal assistant or associate then anything less than…

You can't validate that it is making the right citations by only checking the cases it is citing, and the rankings it provides of those and other cases. You have to validate the non-existence of other, particularly contrary, cases it should be citing either additionally or instead, which it may or may not have ranked as relevant.

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

#640

Post by greiskul »

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.

Well, it is supposed to be a Justice system, and not a game. While it is very easy to forget that, and many of the participants in it clearly don't behave as such, the outcome of it should be to be just.
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