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Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

simonwillison.net

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Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#91
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he didn't bother to verify the facts before he presented them in court? That's scientifically/logically/professionally unsound and irresponsible.

But it’s not deliberately lying

If you sign you name under "I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct." then you absolutely have an obligation to check that your facts are correct.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#92
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability the constraints of the model. It did that admirably. It's not its fault, or in my opinion OpenAI's fault, that the output is being misunderstood and misused by people who can't be bothered understanding it and project their own ideas of how it should function…

"It doesn't lie, it just generates lies and printed them to the screen!" I don't think there's a difference.

It's a text generator. You ask it generate something and it does. It produces only stories. Sometimes those stories are based on actual facts.

This lawyer told it produce a defence story and it did just that.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#93
post #7

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie. What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this? It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify so…

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Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#94
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It doesn't lie, it just generates lies and printed them to the screen!" I don't think there's a difference.

Lying implies an intention. ChatGPT doesn't have that. What ChatGPT definitely does do is generate falsehoods. It's a bullshitting machine. Sometimes the bullshit produces true responses. But ChatGPT has no epistemological basis for knowing truths; it just is trained to say stuff.

And if you want to be pedantic, ChatGPT isn't even generating falsehoods. A falsehood requires propositional content and therefore intentionality, but ChatGPT doesn't have that. It merely generates strings that, when interpreted by a human being as English text, signify falsehoods.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#95
post #26

See, this is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the current AI hype (well, that, plus it’s largely the same people who were going on about cryptocurrency changing the world a few years ago); this stuff just isn’t very _useful_. Like, if writing plausible lies is the 2020s AI boom’s killer app, well, that’s not great, really.

I disagree. I've been tracking the many, many flaws in AI pretty closely (I wrote this article, and a bunch more in this series: https://simonwillison.net/series/llm-misconceptions/ ) And yet... I'm finding ChatGPT and the like wildly useful on a personal level. I think they're deceptively hard to use: you have to put in effort to learn them, and to learn how to avoid the many traps they set for you. But once you've…

Well put.

I stand by this comment:

> Catch-all comment for all ChatGPT use cases:

> (1) Stunning tech demo, a vision of the future today

> ... yet ...

> (2) There are so many sharp edges that I'm not brave (foolhardy?) enough to blindly trust the output

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35068386)

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats like saying robots don't murder - they just kill

Which is actually a very good analogy. A lot of things can kill you, but only a human can be a murderer.

And pit bulls, but I digress. The debate gets lost in translation when we start having what do words mean debate.

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#97
post #7

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie. What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this? It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify so…

There are systems built on top of LLMs that can reach out to a vector database or do a keyword search as a plug in. There’s already companies selling these things, backed by databases of real cases. These work as advertised.

If you go to ChatGPT and just ask it, you’ll get the equivalent of asking Reddit: a decent chance of someone writing you some fan-fiction, or providing plausible bullshit for the lulz.

The real story here isn’t ChatGPT, but that a lawyer did the equivalent of asking online for help and then didn’t bother to cross check the answer before submitting it to a judge.

…and did so while ignore the disclaimer that’s there every time warning users that answers may be hallucinations. A lawyer. Ignoring a four-line disclaimer. A lawyer!

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#99
post #93
post #7

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie. What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this? It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify so…

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[deleted]

Re: Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

#100
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. It was given a sequence of words and tasked with producing a subsequent sequence of words that satisfy with high probability the constraints of the model. It did that admirably. It's not its fault, or in my opinion OpenAI's fault, that the output is being misunderstood and misused by people who can't be bothered understanding it and project their own ideas of how it should function…

> ChatGPT did not lie; it cannot lie. If it lies like a duck, it is a lying duck.

Hallucinated not lied.
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