[HN Gopher] An AI lawyer was set to argue in court - real lawyer...
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An AI lawyer was set to argue in court - real lawyers shut it down
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 411 points
Date : 2023-01-26 08:56 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| residualmind wrote:
| One of the very few things giving me joy lately: People being
| afraid of AI, feeling threatened and insecure in their
| capabilities, because maybe those aren't so great after all...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Every person should still have the right to be defended by a
| human lawyer yet the right to voluntarily choose an AI lawyer to
| either defend you or just hint you as you defend yourself would
| be great to have. It may totally change the game where
| (currently) whoever can afford expensiwe lawyers generally wins
| and whoever can't automatically looses exorbitant sums of money.
| Real lawyers will never let this happen.
| sublinear wrote:
| What a scam! AI should be used to help educate people if they
| want to defend themselves in court (along with a few good books),
| not replace professionals.
|
| This is purely exploitative behavior from anyone offering such a
| service and depressingly nihilistic behavior from anyone seeking
| these kinds of services even if it's just fighting traffic
| tickets for now.
|
| I wish all professional services had similar watchdogs and
| protections from unlicensed/unauthorized work!
|
| We're at the point where leveraging technology is becoming
| existential. Quite literally putting every aspect of life on
| autopilot is not only absurd but a cancer.
|
| If we're going to see the secular decline of certain professional
| services it should be at the hands of well-educated humans, not
| roll-of-the-dice AI. Would a well educated public not be a
| massive net good for society instead of exploiting the poor? What
| a small minded and backwards world we live in today.
| markogrady wrote:
| 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 people who can not
| afford a lawyer. There was a lot of influential people who were
| very excited about this space, so it is strange when it actually
| gets implemented it's not allowed.
|
| I wonder what the wider implications are for the legal system.
| Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to
| the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI? Will lawyers be
| allowed to use AI to find different ways of looking at issues?
| TeaDude wrote:
| I'm interested. What sort of regulations do you think would
| affect the robo-lawyer space in the UK?
|
| Self-representation is frowned upon and mostly disallowed.
| Lawyers are expensive. I'd genuinely consider having ChatGPT
| fight for me.
| danielfoster wrote:
| Privacy seems like it would be a major issue. As a litigant,
| I would not want the opposing side piping my case information
| to a third party and having this information used to train
| the AI for future cases.
|
| AI could be very useful for helping pro-so litigants prepare
| documents. I imagine with this use case as well as the oral
| argument use case, judges are also worried about low quality
| output wasting the court's time.
| etothepii wrote:
| Self-representation is frowned upon, "a person with
| themselves for a client has a fool for a client." But, where
| in the UK system is it disallowed, unless you are a repeated,
| "freeman of the land" nonsense spouter?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Apart from being different jurisdictions, they are different
| issues. The situation in the article involved a pro se litigant
| feeding courtroom proceedings to the AI and regurgitating its
| responses in real time. In that situation you are effectively
| handing your agency over to the AI. You can't really be said to
| be representing yourself in any real sense; you are mindlessly
| parroting what is fed to you.
|
| The situation you describe seems to be more akin to an advanced
| search or information portal that people can use to guide their
| self-representation, or even their decision to engage
| lawyers/discussions with their lawyers (of course, maybe I'm
| misunderstanding). That stuff has basically always been
| allowed; nobody is threatening to prosecute Google because pro
| se litigants use it in their research. There are plenty of
| websites out there that discuss tenants' rights. There are even
| template tenancy agreements available online for free.
|
| Also, what were you proposing to use as the knowledge base for
| your Alexa lawyer? Were you really planning on using ChatGPT or
| some other general purpose AI? Or would the knowledge base be
| carefully curated by qualified professionals? And who would
| create and maintain it, the state? A regulated firm? Or a
| startup with a name like "DoNotPay"?
| brookst wrote:
| Really good thoughts and treatment of the different issues.
| The line between "tool" and "agent" is blurry and will
| probably just keep getting blurrier. But I do think it's
| important for our judicial system to ensure that any
| delegation of representation is to a very qualified third
| party, for both ethical and process/cost reasons.
|
| I'm not sure the startup's name is especially germane though.
| If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like
| 1-800-BEAT-DUI.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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 hallucinate, and there is absolutely no space for
| hallucination in a court of law. The legal profession is perhaps
| the closest one to computer programming, and _absolute_ precision
| is required, not a just-barely-good-enough statistical machine.
| jchw wrote:
| 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 I
| don't see answered anywhere.
|
| That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not
| really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly: seems like
| that problem would elegantly solve itself. I assume the real
| reason it was shot down was out of fear that it _would_ work
| well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there
| was such a visceral response?
| ufmace wrote:
| Thinking about how the problem would "elegantly solve itself"
| seems to illustrate the issue.
|
| Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a
| boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent
| precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and
| gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or
| they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a
| chance to fix it.
|
| A failure mode of jail time and/or massive fines for your
| customers doesn't sound all that elegant to me. This isn't a
| thing to show people cat pictures, I don't think move fast
| and break things is a good strategy.
|
| Not to say that there aren't some entrenched possibly corrupt
| and self-serving interests here. But that doesn't mean they
| don't have a point.
| thinking4real wrote:
| "Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the
| harshest punishment or contempt of court"
|
| That sounds like a horrible judge, maybe this AI can be
| used to sniff them out and get rid of them.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| Judges would be absolutely right to punish lawyers or
| defendants that are bullshitting the court. They are
| wasting time and resources that would otherwise go
| towards cases where people are actually representing
| themselves in good faith.
| treis wrote:
| It's probably better than the existing alternative. Which
| is roughly plead guilty because you don't have money to pay
| a lawyer. Or don't sue someone because you don't have money
| to pay a lawyer.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| Protectionism. Its why they shout for regulation. Keep the
| others out, force consumers to use your product, make lots of
| money.
| fatbird wrote:
| It had to be shot down harshly because there are some
| premises to a courtroom proceeding that aren't met by an AI
| as we currently have.
|
| One of those is that the lawyer arguing a case is properly
| credentialed and has been admitted to the bar, and is a
| professional subject to malpractice standards, who can be
| held responsible for their performance. An AI spitting out
| statistically likely responses can't be considered an actual
| party to the proceedings in that sense.
|
| If a lawyer cites a non-existent precedent, they can make
| their apologies to the court or be sanctioned. If the AI
| cites a non-existent precedent, there's literally no way to
| incorporate that error back into the AI because there's no
| factual underlying model against which to check the AI's
| output--unless you had an actual lawyer checking it, in which
| case, what's the point of the AI?
|
| Someone standing in court, repeating what they hear through
| an earpiece, is literally committing a fraud on the court by
| presenting themselves as a credentialled attorney. The stunt
| of "haha, it was really just chatGPT!" would have had severe
| legal consequences for everyone involved. The harsh response
| saved DoNotPay from itself.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| I don't understand the "cites a non-existent precedent"
| bit. Presumably the AI would have a database of a pile of
| precedent. It wouldn't make up cites. It would have
| "knowledge" of so much precedence, it could likely find
| something to win either side of the argument.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _If the AI cites a non-existent precedent, there 's
| literally no way to incorporate that error back into the AI
| because there's no factual underlying model against which
| to check the AI's output--unless you had an actual lawyer
| checking it, in which case, what's the point of the AI?_
|
| IANAL, but I would bet the level of effort to fact check an
| AI's output would be orders of magnitude lower than
| researching and building all your own facts.
|
| I used it to generate some ffmpeg commands. I had to verify
| all the flags myself, but it was like 5 minutes of work
| compared to probably hours it would have taken me to figure
| them all out on my own.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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, you'll
| need to closely read all of them to confirm that they say
| what the AI claims they say, or are even within the
| ballpark of what the AI claims they say.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _You don 't need to check every cite; that will have
| been done for you by the lawyers and judges involved in
| that case._
|
| Why would this be different with an AI assistant to help
| you? It's not a binary "do or do not". Just because you
| have an assistant doesn't mean you don't do anything.
| Kind of like driver assist can handle some of the load vs
| full self-driving.
|
| > _But checking every cite in an AI 's output: many of
| those citations won't exist, and for the ones that do,
| you'll need to closely read all of them to confirm that
| they say what the AI claims they say, or are even within
| the ballpark of what the AI claims they say._
|
| But you'd have to do this _anyway_ if you did all the
| research yourself. At least the AI assistant can help
| give you some good leads so you don 't have to start from
| scratch. A lazy lawyer could skip some verifying, but a
| good lawyer would still benefit from an AI assistant as
| was my original bet, just like they would benefit from
| interns or paralegals, etc. And all those interns and
| paralegals could still be there, helping verify facts.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _But you 'd have to do this anyway if you did all the
| research yourself. At least the AI assistant can help
| give you some good leads so you don't have to start from
| scratch. _
|
| No, that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. If
| you did the research yourself, you wouldn't need to
| verify every cite once you find a relevant source/cite,
| because previous lawyers would have already validated the
| citations contained within that source. (A good lawyer
| _should_ validate at least some of those cites, but
| frequently that 's not necessary unless you're dealing
| with big stakes.)
|
| And the AI assistant, at least this one and the ones
| based on ChatGPT, _don 't_ provide good leads. They
| provide crap leads that not only don't exist, but
| increase the amount of work.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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 and actually
| finding the important cases including ones the AI didn't
| point you at. However this is not what the bet was about.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| 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 the cost
| of employing said person would be profit. So if it cost <
| 50k a year you'd be saving. (cost of employing is more
| than just salary)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| thombat wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 assistance.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| marmetio wrote:
| 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.
| Everything about the justice system assumes humans in the
| loop. You can't bolt on this one thing without denying people
| justice.
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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"?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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?
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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.
| marmetio wrote:
| 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 line to being considered
| as counsel, even if you said it wasn't. See my response
| to your other comment.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right, this strikes me as exactly the kind of "I'm not
| touching you!" argument that basically never works in a
| court of law. The law's not like code. "Well it's not any
| different than publishing a book, so this is just free
| speech and not legal representation"; "OK, cool, well, we
| both know that's sophist bullshit, judgement against you,
| next case."
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marmetio wrote:
| People are often mistaken about how legal technicalities
| work.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| marmetio wrote:
| You're still illegally providing legal counsel if you're
| not a lawyer, or commiting malpractice if you are. Using
| a machine to commit the same crime doesn't change
| anything.
|
| "Speech" would be like publishing a book about self-
| representation. "Counsel" would be providing advice to a
| defendant about their specific case. The machine would be
| in the courtroom advising the defendant on their trial,
| so that's counsel.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| The tricky bit about your comment. "If you're not a
| lawyer." In this case who's the "You're".
| marmetio wrote:
| 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.
| kadoban wrote:
| > Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there
| was such a visceral response?
|
| It doesn't really matter if it'd work well or poorly. Lawyers
| don't want to be replaced, and being a lawyer entails a great
| ability to be annoying to delay/prevent things you don't want
| to happen.
| bavila wrote:
| > 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...
|
| I have some past experience working in the courts in my
| state, and I know there are many judges who are perfectly
| fine with dismissing minor traffic infractions for no reason
| other than that they feel like it. If you've got an otherwise
| clean traffic abstract and sent in a reasonable sounding
| letter contesting the infraction, these judges probably
| aren't going to thoroughly read through every word of it and
| contrast it with what was alleged in the citation. They don't
| really care about the city making an extra $173 off your
| parking ticket -- they just want to get through their
| citation reviews before lunch. Case dismissed.
|
| So I am not surprised at all by the success of DoNotPay for
| minor traffic infractions. Most traffic courts are heavily
| strained by heavy case loads. If you give them a reason to
| throw your case out so they can go home on time, by all
| means, they will take it.
| lolinder wrote:
| And I don't think anyone here has an issue with DoNotPay
| providing pre-trial advice and tips for someone defending
| themselves. It's bringing that into the courtroom that
| crosses a line from defending yourself to hiring an AI
| lawyer, and that line is where I'm very uncomfortable.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| > _That said, if it 's such a catastrophically stupid idea,
| I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly_
|
| The title of the article seems misleading.
|
| A techbro who doesn't appear to be a lawyer or has any
| understanding of the law wants to use AI so people can defend
| themselves. It doesn't seem like any of this was done with
| input from any bar associations. Without seeing the emails
| and "threats", and ignoring the emotional language it sounds
| like these people were helping him out:
|
| >"In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted
| that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in
| some states punishable up to six months in county jail."
|
| Were these emails "angry" or just stating very plainly and
| with forceful language, that if you do this without the AI
| having the appropriate qualifications, you are most probably
| going to jail?
|
| It even sounds like Browder didn't really widely publicise
| the fact that a case defended by an AI was about to happen.
|
| > _As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among
| various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says
| angry letters began to pour in._
|
| Really sounds like these letter writers did him a favour.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| 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.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| This is the obvious point: they fear it would work well and
| they will have to slowly say good bye to their extremely well
| paid profession.
|
| We are so close from a new disruptive revolution where a lot
| of jobs (not just lawyers) will be made obsolete. Possibly
| similar to inventions like assembly lines, or cars. Such an
| exciting time to be alive!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm
| not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly
|
| To avoid the catastrophy that makes it a catastrophically bad
| idea.
|
| > I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear
| that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better
| explanation for why there was such a visceral response?
|
| It had already worked badly (subpoenaeing the key adverse
| witness, who would provide a basically automatic defense win,
| and one of the most common wins for this kind of case, if
| they failed to show up.)
| danShumway wrote:
| > 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 on something that is
| very likely going to give them sub-par legal representation.
|
| Sneaking it into a courtroom without the judge's knowledge
| feels a lot like a PR stunt, and one that might encourage
| further legal malpractice in the future.
|
| I assume there are other factors at play, I assume many
| lawyers felt insulted or threatened, but ignoring that, it's
| not an experiment I personally would have lauded even as a
| non-lawyer who wishes the legal industry was, well... less of
| an industry. The goal of automating parts of the legal
| industry and improving access to representation is a good
| goal that I agree with. And maybe there are ways where AI can
| help with that, sure. I'm optimistic, I guess. But this feels
| to me like a startup company taking advantage of someone
| who's in legal trouble for a publicity stunt, not like an
| ethically run experiment with controls and with efforts made
| to mitigate harm.
|
| Details have been scarce, so maybe there were other safety
| measures put in place; I could be wrong. But my understanding
| was that this was planned to be secret representation where
| the judge didn't know. And I can't think of any faster way to
| get into trouble with a judge then pulling something like
| that. Even if the AI was brilliant, it apparently wasn't
| brilliant enough to counsel its own developers that running
| experiments on judges is a bad legal strategy.
| tinsmith wrote:
| > 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.
| shrewduser wrote:
| 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > 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.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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 sanction an AI?
|
| Edit: found this:
|
| https://jolt.richmond.edu/is-your-artificial-intelligence-
| gu...
|
| "A person is presumed to be practicing law when engaging in
| any of the following conduct on behalf of another"
|
| Every state seems to use the word "person" in their rules.
|
| An AI is not a person, and therefore can't be sanctioned
| for practicing law - my take anyway.
|
| If non-persons can be prosecuted for illegally practicing
| law, then those non-persons must have the right to get a
| license. IMHO.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Now the question is this. If an AI is doing something
| illegal like practicing law, how does one sanction an AI?
|
| Its not and you don't.
|
| When a _legal person_ (either a natural person or
| corporation) is doing something illegal like unauthorized
| practice of law, you sanction that person. The fact that
| they _use_ an AI as a key tool in their unauthorized law
| practice is not particularly significant, legally.
| HillRat wrote:
| > 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.
| Calavar wrote:
| > 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.
| intrasight wrote:
| Lots of legal software is marketed and sold.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| And legal software is very, very careful to avoid
| constituting legal advice, as opposed to merely legal
| information.
| squokko wrote:
| The legal profession is at the least risk of adverse
| financial effects from anything, because the people who
| make the laws are largely lawyers, and will shape the law
| to their advantage.
| danShumway wrote:
| 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 sanction an AI?
|
| IANAL, but AIs don't have legal personhood, so it would
| be kind of like trying to sanction a hammer. I don't
| think that the _AI_ was being threatened with legal
| action over this stunt, DoNotPay was being threatened.
|
| In an instance where an AI just exists and is Open Source
| and there is no party at fault beyond the person who
| decides to download and use it, then as long as that
| person isn't violating court procedure there's probably
| no one to sanction? It's likely a bad move, but :shrug:.
|
| But this comes into play with stuff like self-driving as
| well. The law doesn't think of AI as something that's
| special. If your AI drives you into the side of the wall,
| it's the same situation as if your back-up camera didn't
| beep and you backed into another car. Either the
| manufacturer is at fault because the tool failed, or
| you're at fault and you didn't have a reasonable
| expectation that the tool wouldn't fail or you used it
| improperly. Or maybe nobody's at fault because everyone
| (both you and the manufacturer) acted reasonably. In all
| of those cases, the AI doesn't have any more legal rights
| or masking of liability than your break pads do, it's not
| treated as a unique entity -- and using an AI doesn't
| change a manufacturer's liability around advertising.
|
| That gets slightly more complicated with copyright law
| surrounding AIs, but even there, it's not that AIs are
| special entities that have their own legal status that
| can't own copyright, it's that (currently, we'll see if
| that precedent holds in the future) US courts rule that
| using an AI is not a sufficiently creative act to
| generate copyright protections.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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 ;)
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Actually, by telling a client what specific arguments to
| make in court, they were giving big-L Legal Advice, and
| thus literally practicing law.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yeah I feel like you're right on the money on re: the
| ethics of using someone who _is_ in legal trouble who will
| have to live with the results. It 's not as sexy but they
| should just build a fake case (or just use an already
| settled one if possible) and play out the scenario. No
| reason it wouldn't be just as effective as a "real" case.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'd have no objections at all to them setting up a fake
| test case with a real judge or real prosecutors and doing
| controlled experiments where there's no actual legal risk
| and where everyone knows it's not a real court case.
| You're right that it wouldn't be as attention-grabbing,
| but I suspect it would be a lot more useful for actually
| determining the AI's capabilities, with basically zero of
| the ethical downsides. I'd be fully in support of an
| experiment like that.
|
| Run it multiple times with multiple defendants, set up a
| control group that's receiving remote advice from actual
| lawyers, mask which group is which to the judges, then
| ask the judge(s) at the end to rank the cases and see
| which defendants did best.
|
| That would be a lot more work, but it would also be much
| higher quality data than what they were trying to do.
| refactor_master wrote:
| > Run it multiple times with multiple defendants, set up
| a control group
|
| And also
|
| > That would be a lot more work, but it would also be
| much higher quality data
|
| I don't know much about the field of law, but anecdotally
| it doesn't strike me as particularly data driven. So I
| think, even before introducing any kind of AI, the above
| would be met with a healthy dose of gatekeeping.
|
| Like the whole sport of referencing prior rulings, based
| on opinions at a point in time doesn't seem much
| different than anecdotes to me.
|
| But I'd love to be proven wrong though.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| And in some ways it's less work! The risks of using a
| real court case are massive if you ask me. We are a
| wildly litigious country. No amount of waivers will stop
| an angry American.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| It's about volume. A fake case would be expensive to run
| and running dozens of them a day would be hard.
|
| That said. The consequence of most traffic tickets is
| increased insurance and a fine. Yes these do have an
| impact on the accused, but they are the least impactful
| legal cases, so it would make sense to focus on them as
| test cases.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Is this not what moot court is? Seems like a great place
| to test and refine this kind of technology. The same
| place lawyers in training are tested and refined.
| g_p wrote:
| Browder (founder) appeared to also acknowledge that it was
| not fit for purpose as well [0].
|
| If something that's providing input to a formal legal process
| (which, let's not forget, means false or inaccurate
| statements have real and potentially prejudicial
| repercussions), "makes facts up and exaggerates", then there
| seems to be no reason they should be talking about taking
| this anywhere near a courthouse.
|
| This feels a lot like "move fast and break things" being
| applied - where the people silly enough to use this tool and
| say whatever it came up with would end up with more serious
| legal issues. It seems like that only stopped when the
| founder himself was the one facing the serious legal issues -
| 'good enough for thee, but not for me'...
|
| I think what many are overlooking is that bad inputs to the
| legal system can jeopardise someone's position in future
| irretrievably, with little or no recourse (due to his class
| action/arbitration waiver). Once someone starts down the road
| of legal action, there's real consequences if you get it
| wrong - not only through exposure, but also through
| prejudicing your own position and making it impossible to
| take a different route, having previously argued something.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555
| chrsig wrote:
| > 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.
| PostOnce wrote:
| 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.
| mountainb wrote:
| What's interesting is that sometimes it does a great job at
| something like telling you the holdings of a case, but then
| other times it gives you a completely incorrect response. If
| you ask it for things like "the X factor test from Johnson v.
| Smith" sometimes it will dutifully report the correct test in
| bullets, but other times will say the completely wrong thing.
|
| 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.
|
| There are also a lot of areas where it will confuse concepts
| from different areas of law, like mixing up criminal battery
| with civil battery, but that's not the worst of the problems.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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 these
| things work. A LLM is not really pulling from any sources
| specifically. It has no concept of a source. It has a bunch
| of weights that were trained to predict the next likely word,
| and those weights were tuned by feeding in a large amount of
| text from the internet.
|
| Improving the quality of the sources used to train the
| weights would likely help, but would not solve the
| fundamental problem that this isn't actually a lossless
| knowledge compression algorithm. It's a statistical machine
| designed to guess the next word. That makes it fundamentally
| non-deterministic and unsuitable for any task where factual
| correctness matters (and there's no knowledgeable human in
| the loop to issue corrections).
| jamesdwilson wrote:
| 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%20
| c...
| Aune wrote:
| Asking "Can you cite some legal precedence for lemon law
| cases?" gives an answer containing
|
| "In California, for example, the California Supreme Court
| in the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1941) held that a
| vehicle which did not meet the manufacturer's express
| warranty was a "lemon" and the manufacturer was liable
| for damages."
|
| I dont think that case exist, there is a first amendment
| case Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) though.
|
| I can't find any reference to Kurtzman or 1941 in any of
| the references. I think the answer is that the AI
| generating the text, and the code supplying the
| references are distinct and do not interact.
| lolinder wrote:
| You.com is hugged to death right now, but from what I can
| see it's a different kind of chatbot. It looks closer to
| Google's featured snippets than it is to ChatGPT.
|
| That kind of chatbot has different limitations that would
| make it unsuitable to be an unsupervised legal advice
| generator.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| ChatGPT can provide correct citations because somewhere
| deep in its weights it does lossily encode real texts and
| citations to real texts. That makes real citations in
| some cases be its most confident guess for what is
| supposed to come next in the sentence. But when there
| isn't a real text it is confident about giving a citation
| about, but it still feels like a citation should be next
| in the output, it will happily invent realistic looking
| citations to texts that have never existed and it has
| never seen in any sources. On the outside, as readers,
| it's hard to tell when this occurs without getting an
| outside confirmation. I'm assuming though that to some
| degree it is itself aware that a linked citation doesn't
| refer to anything
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| 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.
| jamesdwilson wrote:
| thanks very much for this insightful response. i haven't
| heard this perspective before but it makes sense.
| retrac wrote:
| One useful way to think of language models is that they
| are statistical completion engines. It attempts to create
| a completion to the prompt, and then evaluates the
| likelihood, in a statistical sense, that the completion
| would follow the prompt, based on the patterns in the
| training data.
|
| A citation in legalese is very common. A citation that is
| similar or identical to actual citations, in similar
| contexts, is therefore an excellent candidate for the
| completion. A fake citation that looks like a real
| citation is also a rather good candidate, and will
| sometimes squeak past the "is this real or fake?" metric
| used to evaluate generated potential responses.
|
| This may seem like "pulling from a source" but there is
| no token, semantic information, or even any information
| in the model about where and when the citation was
| encountered. There is no identifiable structure or object
| (so far as anyone can tell anyway) in the model that is a
| token related to and containing the citation. It just
| learns to create fake citations so convincingly, that
| most of the time they're actually real citations.
| mountainb wrote:
| This explains some of the particular errors that I've
| seen when poking and prodding it on complex legal
| questions and in trying to get it to brief cases.
| skissane wrote:
| What if we prompt the LLM to generate a response with
| citations, and then we have program which looks up the
| citations in a citation database to validate their
| correctness? Responses with hallucinated citations are
| thrown away, and the LLM is asked to try again. Then, we
| could retrieve the text of the cited article, and get
| another LLM to opine on whether the article text supports
| the point it is being cited in favour of. I think a lot of
| these problems with LLMs could be worked around with a few
| more moving parts.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Definitely, no one is arguing that an AI lawyer will be
| the near future, but I can totally see it being good
| enough for the vast majority of small scale lawsuits
| within 10-20 years.
| mountainb wrote:
| If that's true, then it'll never get to the point that it
| would need to, and its reliability would always be too low
| to use.
| lolinder wrote:
| Exactly. The paradigm is wrong, and in order to get past
| the problems we need a new paradigm, not incremental
| improvement on LLMs.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| This was never meant in good faith. The company did for the PR
| and got the PR.
| intrasight wrote:
| >absolute precision is required
|
| LOL - you gotta be kidding. In software, we strive for that -
| by running tests. In the law, there are no tests.
|
| Not saying that absolute precision isn't required. I know lots
| of cases were an extra comma, a wrong date, or a signature from
| the wrong person has cost someone tens of millions of dollars.
| I would argue that AI-based tools could prevent such HUMAN
| mistakes.
| bostonsre wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. As a senior software engineer, Copilot has
| been invaluable in helping me to do things faster. But having
| an expert human in the loop is key: someone has to _know_
| when the AI did it wrong.
|
| What's so bad about this experiment isn't that they tried to
| use AI in law, it's that they tried to use AI _without_ a
| knowledgeable human in the loop.
| jonathanwallace wrote:
| > there is absolutely no space for hallucination in a court of
| law
|
| I wish you were factually correct here.
|
| We've seen time and time again where courts are mockeries of
| the ideal because of the people in them and the faults they
| bring with them.
|
| E.g. see
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-418_i425.pdf and
| the documented proof _in the dissent_ contradicting the claims
| in the ruling.
| lolinder wrote:
| That there _exist_ mockeries of justice is not proof that we
| should _allow_ them.
| jonathanwallace wrote:
| 100% Agreed.
|
| Rhetorical question: Now what's the enforcement mechanism?
|
| (Also, what's with the downvotes?!?!)
| Miraste wrote:
| That case, to me, is indicative of a larger problem - it's 75
| pages of arcane justifications, and yet I already knew how
| all of the justices had voted just from reading the premise,
| because like every Supreme Court case in a politicized area
| it was decided by personal conviction and the rest is post-
| hoc rationalization.
|
| There is no hallucination on the part of the humans involved,
| only intellectual dishonesty.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| At the same time, all these cases are on the internet
| somewhere. It wouldn't be too tricky to make a lawyer gpt that
| is heavily trained on existing legal documents, and is only
| allowed to quote verbatim from real sources.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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 it
| doesn't make sense, it's not true!!!", while screaming at some
| goy. This is pretty much the level of logic you can expect from
| a judge.
| burkaman wrote:
| Court TV is not real court and is not anything like real
| court.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| yubiox wrote:
| LLM means Master of Law degree, kind of an advanced JD used in
| some specializations like tax. What do you mean here?
| pulisse wrote:
| In this context it means Large Language Model.
| appletrotter wrote:
| Large Language Model
| gnicholas wrote:
| Exactly. I asked it for books on Hong Kong history and it spit
| out five complete fabrications. The titles were plausible and
| authors were real people, but none of them had written the
| books listed.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Can you follow up and ask it "Is [title] by [author] a
| published book?
| lolinder wrote:
| I just tried, and it did issue a correction and gave me
| five new books, several of which were also fictitious.
|
| But the real question is, could you follow up with a
| question as it dictating to you live in a courtroom?
| weatherlite wrote:
| They will pretty soon be able to fact check everything they say
| when they gain real time internet connectivity. But for now
| yeah you're right. A year-two from now this won't be true
| anymore.
| Phlarp wrote:
| AI hallucinations are going to be the new database query
| injection. Saying that real time internet connected fact
| checking will solve that is every bit as naive as thinking
| the invention of higher level database abstractions like an
| ORM will solve trivially injectable code.
|
| We can't even make live fact checking work with humans at the
| wheel. Legacy code bases are so prolific and terrible we're
| staring down the barrel of a second major industry crises for
| parsing dates past 2037, but sure LLM's are totally going to
| get implemented securely and updated regularly unlike all the
| other software in the world.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I'd also argue that "hallucination" is, at least in some
| form, pretty commonplace in courtrooms. Neither lawyers' nor
| judges' memories are foolproof and eyewitness studies show
| that humans don't even realise how much stuff their brain
| makes up on the spot to fill blanks. If nothing else, I
| expect AI to raise awareness for human flaws in the current
| system.
| lolinder wrote:
| That the legal system has flaws isn't a good argument for
| allowing those flaws to become automated. If we're going to
| automate a task, we should expect it to better, not worse
| or just as bad (at this stage it would definitely be
| worse).
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| No shot. It is not commonplace there that lawyers and
| judges are making ridiculous arguments or citing fictional
| case law.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Being connected to the internet may make their information
| more up to date but they won't stop being confidently
| incorrect. These language models are amazing at token
| prediction but it's a mistake to believe that they're
| actually intelligent.
|
| Give it an inane prompt to better see the difference, like
| "write me an essay about camels and their value in
| cybersecurity" which gives us the answer
|
| "The camel is a valuable animal in the cybersecurity field
| due to its ability to store large amounts of data in its
| hump. Camels are able to cross vast distances with little
| water, which makes them ideal for carrying large amounts of
| data across networks. They are also very sturdy animals, able
| to withstand harsh conditions and even attacks from cyber
| criminals. In addition, their long eyelashes protect their
| eyes from sand and dust, making them perfect for working in
| dusty environments such as data centers."
|
| Having internet access wouldn't fix this.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Well it did what you asked him to do , you ordered it to
| write an essay about camels and their value in
| cybersecurity. It doesn't understand if you're joking or
| not or what the purpose of the whole thing.
|
| I asked it this:
|
| Are camels important to cyber security?
|
| Answer:
|
| "No, camels are not typically considered to be important
| for cyber security. Camels are domesticated mammals that
| are well-adapted to desert environments and are often used
| as a means of transportation or for their milk, meat, and
| hides. Cyber security, on the other hand, is the practice
| of protecting computer systems, networks, and data from
| unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption,
| modification, or destruction. The two are not related."
|
| Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| A human would say that's ridiculous and tell you why.
| Google would give you a link to Apache Camel. ChatGPT
| tells you about how great a camels humps are for data
| storage.
|
| You tell me which system is intelligent.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| That's preposterous. An intelligent agent, human,
| mineral, or otherwise, would respond that this is a
| ridiculous idea and ideally explain the reasons that such
| is the case. Imagine you are a student and you asked this
| amazing AI sone question of similar if mildly ridiculed
| and turn imagine the student didn't already know the
| answer. Would you think this kind of response would be an
| example of an intelligent AI?
|
| If it cannot deal with such things without being prompted
| in such a way that the prompter knows the answer already,
| how could it deal with complex legal situations with
| actually intelligent adversaries?
| lolinder wrote:
| This is overly optimistic. For one, fact checking is much
| harder than you think it is. Aside from that, there are also
| many additional problems with AI legal representation, such
| as lack of body language cues, inability to formulate a
| coherent legal strategy, and bad logical leaps. We're nowhere
| near to solving those problems.
| codingdave wrote:
| How would they be able to parse facts from fiction? Just
| because something is online does not mean it is true.
| weatherlite wrote:
| It's not like humans are great at parsing facts from
| fictions ... how do humans do it?
| stetrain wrote:
| Yep, it can fact check against authoritative sounding
| internet articles that were also written by AI.
| humans2 wrote:
| [dead]
| gfodor wrote:
| If this is the case, the lawyers should have nothing to fear,
| and the plaintiff nothing to lose but a parking ticket. I say
| we stop arguing and run the experiment.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I mean, why not run it as an experiment? Fake Parking ticket,
| fake defendant, pay a judge to do the fake presiding. If the
| actual goal was to test it, it would be trivially easy to do.
| The goal here wasn't to test it, it was to get publicity.
| freejazz wrote:
| Why is there this narrative that it's a response being done
| out of fear? That seems to be a huge misunderstanding on your
| part.
| drakythe wrote:
| As noted by several lawyers when some of the details of this
| experiment were revealed: The AI already committed a cardinal
| sin of traffic court in that it subpoenaed the ticketing
| officer.
|
| Rule 1 of traffic court: If the state's witness (the
| ticketing officer) doesn't show, defendant gets off. You do
| not subpoena that witness, thereby ensuring they show up.
|
| If the AI or its handlers cannot be trusted to pregame the
| court appearance even remotely well then no way in hell
| should it be trusted with the actual trial.
|
| You want to run this experiment? Great, lets setup a mock
| court with a real judge and observing lawyers and run through
| it. But don't waste a real court's time or some poor
| bastard's money by trying it in the real world first.
|
| A reminder that "Move fast and break things" should never
| apply where user's life or liberty is at stake.
| gfodor wrote:
| agree to your last point, but a traffic ticket beta test
| does not fail that test
| drakythe wrote:
| While I agree in absolute terms, in legal terms it is
| problematic because it sets precedent, which is what the
| law often runs off of. Better to not breach that line
| until we're sure it can perform in all circumstances, or
| rules have been established which clearly delineate where
| AI assistance/lawyering is allowed and where it isn't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _noted by several lawyers when some of the details of
| this experiment were revealed: The AI already committed a
| cardinal sin of traffic court in that it subpoenaed the
| ticketing officer_
|
| Would you have a source?
| drakythe wrote:
| https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/161754192110223
| 360...
|
| Mike Dunford is a practicing attorney. Embedded tweet is
| of a non-lawyer who screenshotted Joshua Browser DoNotPay
| CEO) saying the subpoena had been sent. He has since
| deleted those tweets as DNP backs away from this plan.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We can certainly run the experiment, just like we can let a
| kid touch a hot pan on the stove.
|
| Like the kid, the experiment is not to add knowledge to the
| world. Every adult knows touching a hot pan results in a
| burn. Just like everyone who understands how current LLMs
| work knows that it will fail at being a lawyer.
|
| Instead the point of such an experiment is to train the
| experimenter. The kid learns not to touch pans on the stove.
|
| In this case it's not fair to metaphorically burn desperate
| legal defendants so that the leaders and investors in an LLM
| lawyer company learn their lesson. It's the same reason we
| don't let companies "experiment" with using random substances
| to treat cancer.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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
| much is at stake" line. If we know that ChatGPT is not
| equipped to give legal advice in the general case, there's no
| reason to allow a company to sell it as a stand-in for a
| lawyer.
|
| (I would feel differently about a defendant deciding to use
| the free ChatGPT in this way, because they would be
| deliberately ignoring the warnings ChatGPT gives. It's the
| fact that someone decided to make _selling_ AI legal advice
| into a business model that makes it troubling.)
| fallingknife wrote:
| They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that
| it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a
| company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't
| targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at
| people who can't, for now at least.
| notahacker wrote:
| Considering it's so bad it came to people's attention
| when it _sent a subpoena to make sure someone came to
| testify against its client when he might have had a
| default judgement in his favour if they hadn 't_, I think
| the people who can't afford the lawyers have a lot more
| to be scared of than the lawyers...
|
| And the reason lawyers are expensive is because _bad_
| legal advice usually costs far more in the long run.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| It's naive to think that a company would develop an AI
| capable of beating a lawyer in court and then sell it
| cheaply to poor people to beat traffic tickets. If anyone
| ever manages to develop an AI that is actually capable of
| replacing a lawyer, it will be priced way, way out of
| reach of those people. It will be sold to giant
| corporations so that they can spend $500k on licence fees
| rather than $1 million on legal fees. (And unless those
| corporations can get indemnities from the software vendor
| backed by personal guarantees they'd still be getting a
| raw deal.)
|
| These people are being sold snake oil. Cheap snake oil,
| maybe, but snake oil nonetheless.
| freejazz wrote:
| Lawyers aren't scared at all. It's traffic court, you are
| really overstating things. If it was a serious case, it'd
| be even more ridiculous to put more on the line by being
| represented by a computer algorithm that isn't subject to
| any of the licensing standards of an atty, none of the
| repercussions, and being run by a business that is
| disclaiming all liability for their conduct.
|
| You know what an attorney can't do? Disclaim malpractice
| liability!
|
| It'd be wondrous if the esteemed minds of hackernews
| could put their brain cycles towards actually applying
| common sense and other things rather than jerking off to
| edgy narratives about disruption while completely
| disregarding the relevant facts to focus on what they
| find politically juicy ("lawyers are scared it will
| succeed". It's a tautological narrative you are weaving
| for yourself that completely skirts past all the
| principles underlying the legal profession and it's
| development over hundreds of years.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that
| it will succeed_
|
| Lawyers make _heavy_ use of automated document sifting in
| _e.g._ e-discovery.
|
| Junior lawyers are expensive. Tech that makes them
| superfluous is a boon to partners. When we toss the
| village drunk from the bar, it isn't because we're scared
| they'll drink all the booze.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared
| that it will succeed.
|
| Not really. There are more lawyers than legal jobs. A lot
| of lawyers are toiling for well under 100k a year. People
| pay 1500 dollars an hour for some lawyers and 150 an hour
| for others due to perceived (and actual) quality
| differences. Adding a bunch more non-lawyers isn't going
| to impact the demand for the 1500 dollars an hour
| lawyers.
|
| Legal work is expensive because ANY sort of bespoke
| professional work is expensive. Imagine if software
| developers had to customize their work for each customer.
| gfodor wrote:
| Ultimately though the argument you have set up here seems
| to make it all but impossible for AI to displace humans in
| the legal profession. If the argument is "precedent rules"
| then "only humans can be lawyers" is precedent.
|
| I'm not sure if this particular case with this particular
| technology made sense - but I do think we need to encourage
| AI penetration of the legal profession, in a way that has
| minimal downside risk. (For defendants and plaintiffs, not
| lawyers.) It would be hugely beneficial for society if
| access to good legal advice was made extremely cheap.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, if in a hypothetical future we have technology that
| is capable of reliably performing the role, I don't have
| a problem with it. This tech is explicitly founded on
| LLMs, which have major inherent weaknesses that make them
| unsuitable.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> 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.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Incompetent representation is grounds for a mistrial, or
| successful appeal.
|
| The prosecution wants to win, but they'd prefer to only
| have to win once.
|
| If you have to go _back_ to trial, you 've already showed
| your hand, and the defense (who is now competent) can
| adapt to it.
| freejazz wrote:
| When did the opposing side's lawyers say anything about
| this? Are you confused? Law is a regulated profession.
| The lawyers pointing out that this is illegal aren't on
| the other side of the case...
| matthewheath wrote:
| I only have immediate knowledge of UK law, but lawyers
| will generally have a duty to the court to act with
| independence in the interests of justice. This tends to
| mean that in situations where one side are self-
| represented or using the services of ChatGPT, etc. the
| opposing side is under a duty not to take unfair
| advantage of the fact that one side is not legally
| trained.
|
| They don't have to _help_ them, but they can 't act
| abusively by, for example, exploiting lack of procedural
| knowledge.
|
| If they deliberately took advantage of one side using
| ChatGPT and getting it wrong because the legal foundation
| of knowledge isn't there for that person, that _could_ be
| a breach of their duty to the court and result in
| professional censure or other regulatory consequences.
| greiskul wrote:
| 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.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| 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.
| torstenvl wrote:
| 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...) in many cases lack of a
| competent attorney is considered structural error, meaning
| automatic reversal.
|
| In practice, that means that judges (who are trying to
| prevent their decisions from being overturned) will gently
| correct defense counsel and guide them toward competence,
| something that frustrated me when I was a prosecutor but
| which the system relies upon.
| gptgpp wrote:
| 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...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Do judges know about all prior cases or do they check when
| they hear one referenced? It feels like this could easily
| slip through, no?
| torstenvl wrote:
| "Counsel, I'm unfamiliar with the case you've cited. Have
| you brought a copy for the court? No? How about a bench
| brief? Very well. I am going to excuse the panel for lunch
| and place the court in recess. Members of the jury, please
| return at 1:00. Counsel, please arrive with bench briefs
| including printouts of major cases at 12:30. Court stands
| in recess." _bang_
|
| "All rise!"
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| That's not how the legal system works. You aren't slipping
| anything through. Either the judge knows the case, they
| don't know all the cases, or the judge will research or
| clerks will research and you will be sanctioned if you try
| to do so thing unethical.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| IANAL, but I'd think in this case this is prosecutor's job.
|
| Also, the original post is about the traffic ticket. I'm
| pretty sure if the judge hears a reference to something he
| had never heard before, he'll be like "huh? wtf?"
| [deleted]
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| What would happen if a human lawyer did that?
| ruined wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disbarment
| eloff wrote:
| I think you're right here and it's the same reason I see AI as
| a tool in the software profession. You can use it to speed up
| your work, but you have to have someone fully trained who can
| tell the difference between looks good but is wrong, versus is
| actually usable.
|
| I've been using copilot for half a year now and it's helpful,
| but often wrong. I carefully verify anything it gives me before
| using it. I've had one bug that made it to production where I
| think copilot inserted code that I didn't notice and which
| slipped past code review. I've had countless garbage
| suggestions I ignored, and a surprising amount of code that
| seemed reasonable but was subtly broken.
|
| This will still require a human lawyer (and/or intern,
| depending on the stakes) to check its output carefully. I am
| not now, nor have I ever been afraid that AI is coming after my
| job. When it does, we're dangerously close to general AI and a
| paradigm shift of such magnitude and consequence that it's
| called The Singularity. At which point we may have bigger
| worries than jobs.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > I've had one bug that made it to production where I think
| copilot inserted code that I didn't notice and which slipped
| past code review
|
| I'm not saying this is good but come on. Humans do that all
| the time, why aren't we so harsh on humans?
|
| > I am not now, nor have I ever been afraid that AI is coming
| after my job
|
| I am. This thing amazed me, and even if it won't be able to
| 100% replace humans (which I doubt), it can make juniors
| orders of magnitude more productive for example. This will be
| a complete disruption of the industry and doesn't bode well
| for salaries.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Broken window fallaccy. Software is so bad, that AI making
| is more productive won't put us out of work, it will make
| software suck a bit less. It eill5 make bugfixes and tech
| debt payback more affordable.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm in the top x% of my profession, after 20 years of
| grinding. I'm unafraid. I don't see my salary taking a cut
| anytime soon. When I was searching for a job back in March,
| I had a 50% offer to response rate (if the company
| responded to my application.)
|
| People who are just skating by may have cause for concern.
| But those are the people with the most to gain from it, so
| maybe not even them.
|
| Demand is so high in the business, I have trouble imagining
| that any tool could make a meaningful impact on that.
|
| It would need to multiply productivity by a huge number,
| and nothing has that impact. Copilot is barely,
| optimistically, above 10%. I don't really think I get that
| much, but just for arguments sake.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes! I think the legal system would and should look
| differently at a tool like this in the ear of a licensed
| lawyer, and AI tools will be invaluable for legal research. I
| just don't think the output of an AI should be fed directly
| into a non-lawyer's ear, any more than I think a non-
| programmer should try to build a startup with ChatGPT as
| technical co-founder.
| ma2rten wrote:
| You could probably do much better than ChatGPT if you built a
| bot specifically for being a lawyer.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes, you'd do better, but you'd still have a LLM that is
| designed to predict the _most likely_ next words. It would
| still hallucinate and invent case law, it would just be even
| harder for a non-lawyer to recognize the hallucination.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Maybe that's where we're headed. It looks like it's becoming
| more and more okay to just make things up to please your tribe.
| Why shouldn't that seep into the courtroom. I hope this doesn't
| happen.
| narrator wrote:
| If you make a ridiculous argument using confabulated case law
| as a lawyer, you can be subject to discipline by the state bar
| and even lose your law license. The legal system's time and
| attention is not free and unlimited and that's why you need a
| license to practice law. The judges and so forth don't want to
| deal with a bunch of people talking nonsense. Who is the lawyer
| who is putting their reputation on the line for the AI's
| argument? The people doing this want to say nobody is at fault
| for the obviously bogus arguments it's going to spout. That's
| why it's unacceptable.
| ethanbond wrote:
| DoNotPay seems to know very well what they're doing.
|
| It really doesn't strike me as true that law requires absolute
| precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far)
| arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the
| interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that
| shatter credibility, but that's very different from "get one
| thing wrong and the system doesn't work at all or works in
| wildly unexpected ways."
|
| Low end law will be one of the first areas to go due to this
| tech. DoNotPay actually has already been doing this stuff
| successfully for a while (not in court proceedings themselves
| though).
| intrasight wrote:
| >DoNotPay seems to know very well what they're doing.
|
| And even when they lose the win. Look at the publicity they
| are getting.
| lolinder wrote:
| There are also many adjacent algorithms that could solve the
| same problem, but you still need to execute the algorithm
| correctly. LLMs are not ready for _unsupervised_ use in any
| domain outside of curiosity, and what DoNotPay is proposing
| would be to let one roam free in a courtroom.
|
| I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and
| discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal
| experience parroting an LLM in court is deeply problematic,
| even if the stakes are low in this particular category of
| law.
| ethanbond wrote:
| That's nowhere near analogous because between every working
| algorithm are massive gulfs of syntactic and semantic
| failure zones. This is _not_ the case with human language,
| which is the whole power of both language production and
| language interpretation.
|
| Is it more problematic than this person 1) not being
| represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be
| represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and
| disinterested public defender?
|
| I'm not convinced.
|
| The idea that we need to wait to do this stuff until the
| people whose profession is under threat give "permission"
| is dismissible on its face and is exactly why we _should_
| be doing this is as quickly as possible. For what it's
| worth, I mostly agree with you: I'm doubtful the technology
| is there yet. But that's a call for each defendant to make
| in each new case and so long as they're of sound mind, they
| should be free to pick whatever legal counsel they want.
| freejazz wrote:
| "I'm not convinced."
|
| Yeah, no surprise. You seem completely unreasonable if
| you posit only these three options for freakin' traffic
| court...
| ethanbond wrote:
| What are the others? If you contest a ticket, you either
| have representation or you don't. You can either afford
| good representation or you cannot.
| freejazz wrote:
| Traffic court attorneys aren't expensive. They are
| actually incredibly cheap. There's also no public
| defenders in US traffic courts at least.
| bluGill wrote:
| Last time I checked with a lawyer about a traffic ticket
| he told me that it wasn't worth his time to go to court
| (this was the school provided free legal service and the
| case was just a burnt headlight that I didn't have
| verified fixed within a week, you decide if he should
| have gone to court with me or if he would have for a more
| complex case), but I was instructed how to present my
| case. I got my fine reduced at least, which was important
| as a student paying my own way (I'm one of the last to
| pay for college just by working jobs between class, so
| this was important)
| freejazz wrote:
| Yeah, that's because he's an attorney that gets paid a
| lot. go to the traffic court and you'll find the ones
| that don't get paid a lot. That's why they are hanging
| out in traffic court representing litigants there.
| notahacker wrote:
| I mean, _not contesting the ticket_ is likely to be a
| better option than delegating your chances of not being
| convicted of contempt of court or perjury to the
| truthfulness and legal understanding of an LLM...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Sure if your objective is to minimize your own personal
| exposure. If your goal is to push toward a world where
| poor folks aren't coerced into not contesting their
| tickets because they can't afford to go to court or get
| representation, then maybe it is a good option.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _goal is to push toward a world where poor folks aren't
| coerced into not contesting their tickets_
|
| Invest in a company doing this properly and not pushing
| half-baked frauds into the world. Supervised learning,
| mock trials. You're proposing turning those poor folk
| into Guinea pigs, gambling with their freedom from afar.
| ethanbond wrote:
| This company has been doing this stuff _for years_. Yes
| this is a big step forward but it's not from zero, as
| you're suggesting. What makes you think they haven't been
| doing mock trials and tons of supervised learning?
|
| And no, I'm not. I don't think Defendant Zero (or one, or
| two, or 100) should be people whose lives would be
| seriously affected by errors. I'm pretty sure DNP doesn't
| either.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What makes you think they haven't been doing mock
| trials and tons of supervised learning?_
|
| The CEO tweeting they fucked up a default judgement [1].
| That not only communicates model failure, but also lack
| of domain expertise and controls at the organisational
| level.
|
| [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/questauthority/status/1617
| 5419211...
| freejazz wrote:
| It's not a licensed attorney.. it can't be disbarred.. it
| has no legal duties to its clients. What don't you get??
| notahacker wrote:
| I prefer a world in which people pay a small fine or make
| their own excuses rather than pay the fine money to a VC-
| backed startup for access to an LLM to mount a legally
| unsound defence that ends up getting them into a _lot_
| more trouble, yes.
|
| If your goal is to ensure poor folks are pushed towards
| paying an utterly unaccountable service further fees to
| escalate legal cases they don't have the knowledge to win
| so the LPs of Andreesen Horowitz have that bit more
| growth in their portfolio, I can see how you would think
| differently.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yes yes, Andreessen bad and assumed negative outcomes
| bad, therefore my solution (nil) is just fine.
| freejazz wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy that you are making up in order
| to politically justify your narrative that is otherwise
| completely made up nonsense best described as legal
| malpractice.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant
| fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely
| overworked and disinterested public defender?_
|
| You're leaving off being put in jail for contempt of
| court, perjuring oneself, making procedural errors that
| result in an adverse default ruling, racking up fines,
| _et cetera_. Bad legal representation is ruinous.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Gee good thing everyone in court gets good representation
| at reasonable prices eh?
|
| I get that lawyers think their profession is important
| (it is) and that by and large they're positive for their
| clients (they are), but there are a lot of people who
| simply do not have access to any worthwhile
| representation. I saw Spanish-speaking kids sent to
| juvenile detention for very minor charges conducted in
| English with no interpreter and a completely useless
| public defender. So in my view _that_ is the alternative
| for many people, not Pretty Decent Representation.
|
| There are people who can stomach the downside risks to
| push this tech forward for people who cannot stomach the
| downside risks _of the current reality._
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _lot of people who simply do not have access to any
| worthwhile representation_
|
| They'd be better off representing themselves than
| trusting a non-lawyer "lawyer" that subpoenas no-show
| cops. Not another Andreessen-backed cluster.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Do you know that? How do you know that's what the model
| would do? How do you know that the defendant doesn't have
| an 80 IQ and an elementary school grasp on English? Do
| you think this doesn't happen today and that these people
| don't get absolutely _dragged_ by the system?
| notahacker wrote:
| We know that subpoenaing [possibly] no-show cops is what
| the model will do because _that is what the CEO says the
| model did_ in the run up to this particular case.
|
| Someone with an 80 IQ and an elementary school grasp of
| English is going to get absolutely _dragged_ by the
| system with or without a "robot lawyer" if they insist
| on fighting without competent representation, but they'd
| probably still stand a better chance of getting off a
| fine on a technicality if they weren't paying a VC-backed
| startup to write a letter make sure the cops turned up to
| testify against them.
|
| They'd also be more likely to _not_ get absolutely
| dragged if they listened to a human that told them not to
| bother than a signup flow that encouraged them to
| purchase further legal representation to pursue the case.
| [deleted]
| freejazz wrote:
| "DoNotPay seems to know very well what they're doing."
|
| What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal.
| It's the unlicensed practice of law.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| So if a chat program can pass the bar exam, it's okay?
| Because I would bet that if a program can represent someone
| semi-competently in court, passing the bar exam which needs
| an objective marking criterion would be trivial by
| comparison.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most states also require a law degree in addition to
| passing the Bar.
|
| But a fun fact is that magistrates generally aren't
| required to pass the Bar, nor hold a law degree. Most
| states require extremely basic courses of 40 or so hours
| of training. I know of a magistrate that has tried
| numerous times to pass the Bar and has failed. I'm not
| sure how much competence our system mandates.
| freejazz wrote:
| Cart before the horse... you have to pass the bar before
| you get the chance to represent someone semi-competently
| in court. Generally, lawyers have 5 years of experience
| before they are considered competent enough to be semi-
| competently represent someone in court.
| notahacker wrote:
| Alternative spin on the "know very well what they're
| doing": they know very well that it's unlicensed practice
| of law and they'd have to withdraw from the case.
|
| But doing so generates lots of publicity for their online
| wizards that send out boilerplate legal letters.
|
| The CEO tweeted about the system subpoenaing the traffic
| cop. If they actually built a system which is so advanced
| it can handle a court case in real time and yet so ignorant
| of the basics of fighting a traffic ticket it subpoenas the
| traffic cop it's... a very odd approach to product
| management for the flagship product of a legal specialist,
| and a bit scary to think anyone would use it. Easier to
| make the mistake of claiming your flagship system does
| stuff it shouldn't be doing if it's just vaporware and you
| haven't put too much thought into what it _should_ do
| ethanbond wrote:
| Their track record? Seems like this is the first you're
| hearing of them, but this is just the latest (and yes, most
| ambitious) experiment. They've been successfully using
| technology to help normal people defeat abusive systems
| built by "the professions" for years.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Most people successfully contest traffic tickets by just
| showing up to traffic court. It really is that easy.
|
| So, DoNotPay is basically just a scam taking money from
| people without providing anything of value.
| yunwal wrote:
| They've been scamming people for years and hitting them
| with BS credit card charges. Just another abusive system
| tacked onto the rest.
| newswasboring wrote:
| That's a pretty definitive and bold assertion. Any
| source?
| 55555 wrote:
| https://www.trustpilot.com/review/donotpay.com
| mattwad wrote:
| It probably should not _replace_ a lawyer, though. Just
| enable a single lawyer to handle more cases
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Ironically, I recently saw a convo on Twitter where someone was
| showing off a ChatGPT generated legal argument, and, it had
| done exactly that, hallucinated a case to cite.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>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
| mattwad wrote:
| i use copilot every day, and it's never written more than one
| line at a time that didn't need adjusting. If you are letting
| an AI write code for you without knowing what it does, you
| should not be in programming. I would probably just fire
| someone if their response to me was ever "well the AI wrote
| that bit of code that deleted our DB, i didnt know what it
| did"
| godshatter wrote:
| ChatGPT has no concept of a model for code, no understanding
| of syntax or logic or even language keywords. It just pulls
| info out of it's backside that sounds believable like a lot
| of people do, it's just better at it. I suspect the immediate
| future will be resplendent with tales of AI-generated code
| causing catastrophes.
| gptgpp wrote:
| 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.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| There's a lot of people doing a big circle jerk over ChatGPT
| with wild ideas of singularity and oddly eagerly awaiting the
| end of white collar work. Whatever. I agree that programmers
| being obsessed with it can lead to skill atrophy. But, in
| reality, there are many people that are very technical and
| are not becoming reliant on these things for coding.
| enoch2090 wrote:
| > 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| At which point you have seriously annoyed the judge, and made
| him/her/justice-of-other-gender scrutinize your points _much_
| more skeptically.
| computerex wrote:
| Yes it's true that LLMs hallucinate facts, but there are ways
| to control that. Despite the challenges they can spit out
| perfectly functional code to spec to boot. So for me it's not
| too much of a stretch to think that it'd do a reasonably good
| job at defending simple cases.
| criddell wrote:
| It would be kind of funny to hear an argument made by an LLM
| that has digested all the sovereign citizen bs.
| [deleted]
| winReInstall wrote:
| Eh, what if it was trained on all the previous cases ever to
| have existed? I think it could be pretty good, as long as it
| detects novelty as a to flag and confirm error case.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That's not the point. LLMs work by predicting what text to
| generate next. It doesn't work by choosing facts, it works by
| saying the thing that sounds the most appropriate. That's why
| it's so confidently wrong. No amount of training will
| eliminate this problem: it's an issue with the architecture
| of LLMs today.
| lolinder wrote:
| You could layer another system on top of the LLM generations
| that attempts to look up cases referenced and discards the
| response if they don't exist, but that only solves that
| particular failure mode.
|
| There are other kinds of failures that will be much harder to
| detect: arguments that sound right but are logically flawed,
| lost context due to inability to read body language and tone
| of voice, and lack of a coherent strategy, to name a few.
|
| All of these things could theoretically be solved
| individually, but each would require new systems to be added
| which have their own new failure modes. At our current
| technological level the problem is intractable, even for
| seemingly simple cases like this one. A defendant is better
| off defending themselves with their own preparation than they
| are relying on modern AI in the heat of the moment.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| It's bizarre that anyone that supposedly works in
| technology even thinks this is realistic. This betrays a
| large lack of knowledge of technology and a child like
| understanding of the legal system.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| It fails at determining if a number is prime and provides
| bogus arguments to such effect. You think it would make sense
| for this to argue complex legal cases with strategy? This
| isn't Go or chess.
| ergocoder wrote:
| People choosing to represent themselves with an AI assistant is a
| big no. It is too dangerous.
|
| Choosing not to vaccinate is a yes.
|
| Owning a gun is a yes.
|
| Wearing bullet proof vests and shooting each other for fun is
| also a yes. https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/aug/22/case-
| dropped-in-b...
|
| What a strange way of having freedom.
| bilekas wrote:
| Maybe I'm not fully understanding here but isn't the defendant
| entitled to represent themselves?
|
| Couldn't the defendant just do what the lawyer had planned?
|
| The complaining letters make it out that you cannot participate
| in law if you're not a bar member..
| LelouBil wrote:
| No, the problem is that you need to be licensed to give legal
| advice. And the chatbot is not a licensed lawyer.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| It's also not a person.
| whycome wrote:
| How long until someone deems this 'aiphobic'?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I'm starting to side with the Butlerian Jihad, "Thou shalt not
| make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"
| sbaiddn wrote:
| "Move fast and break things" should be followed by "commit
| criminal negligence and go to jail!"
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Which of Adam Smith's principles was it that said that state
| regulations are needed to secure the wages of labor?... Oh wait,
| that's Marx.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Sounds like those lawyers are scared!
| pseingatl wrote:
| Their mistake was using this tool in a criminal case. They could
| have rolled it out for arbitrations and/or mediations,
| proceedings which do not necessarily require legal counsel.
|
| The legal system has various functions. One of these is
| determining the facts. Think of it as agreeing on what prompt to
| give the AI. Once the facts are determined, everything else
| pretty much follows.
|
| If Fact A then Consequence B. If the parties can agree on the
| facts, AI will tell them the likely consequences. But as a fact-
| finding tool, in present form AI is not useful.
|
| Maybe the next iteration.
| drKarl wrote:
| There's two separate issues at play here. On the left hand, it's
| true that ChatGPT, while impressive, on its current incarnation
| sometimes returns correct responses, and some other times it
| returns seemingly correct hallucinations. Unless the accuracy and
| certainty is not over a certain threshold, say 95% for example, I
| don't think it would be safe to use it for critical use cases,
| like acting as a lawyer, as it very well might hallucinate laws
| or prior cases, etc.
|
| On the right hand, lawyers see the writing on the wall and see AI
| as a threat to their really lucrative business, and they'll use
| any means at their disposal to outlaw it or slow the adoption of
| AI technologies to replace lawyers.
|
| Hell, I'm a software engineer and I see the writing on the wall
| too, and I see AI as a threat as well. I also acknowledge the
| limitless opportunities. I'm at equal parts excited and terrified
| by what's coming.
| pierrebai wrote:
| Another instance of the irreconcilable dichotomy of: "no one
| shall ignore the law" and "only lawyers can understand the law".
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Only lawyers can give legal advice, big difference.
|
| You can represent yourself in court if you want to (generally,
| you don't) but if you want to offer that service to others, you
| need to be a licensed lawyer. It is the same for many
| professions.
| pierrebai wrote:
| You are saying exactly what I'm saying, only with different
| words. As life goes on, this is a trend I get more and more
| acutely aware of: people bias, opinion and values make them
| re-interpret what others say to make it fit in their already
| made up mind about what the conversation is about.
|
| I was saying that not knowing the law is not a defense yet
| the laws are so complex that an expensive expert that
| dedicated all their study to the law is practically (as in,
| yes, you have the option to not use a lawyer) required in
| court.
|
| It is not the same for many profession. In no other
| profession are non-experts expected and required to know the
| matter.
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| Lawyer Bar Associations trying their best to starve off the
| inevitable. If only ChatGPT was trained with case law and law
| school texts. Then when they sue, the ChatGPT model can defend
| itself. I'm affected by this too, but watching lawyers be
| rendered obsolete makes me very excited.
| samtp wrote:
| You're ignoring the fact that ChatGPT isn't trained to be
| correct or logical, it's trained to be semantically
| understandable and coherent. Which is an absolutely terrible
| model to rely on in a court room.
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| I know which is probably why this was a proof of concept with
| what would have been abysmal results.
| samtp wrote:
| This sentiment seems to be completely at odds with your
| first comment.
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| 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.
| samtp wrote:
| 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.
| jtode wrote:
| This is gonna be the funniest battle ever. AI is not gonna go
| away and it will be better at law than humans. I'll take any
| odds.
| gfodor wrote:
| Same. Lawyers are screwed - they have been an insanely overpaid
| profession forever, this is going to be absolutely devastating
| for them. Also, there isn't a whole lot of leverage in
| lawyering compared to the other professions that AI is poised
| to dominate, so it feels like lawyers in particular are going
| to have a hard time transforming themselves into a new
| profession that is symbiotic with AI systems. This is a case
| where the human part may entirely go away for large swathes of
| cases.
| jtode wrote:
| You love to see it.
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| Unfortunately, the existence of the law cartel does not make this
| ok. The solution is to break down the law cartel so that there
| are more mediocre bar members that can facilitate the AI argument
| being made.
|
| You can represent yourself (where applicable) or you can have
| representation. That representation is an officer of the court
| and must adhere to professional standards to maintain their
| license and bar membership. Even if you could force an algorithm
| to adhere to professional standards, it's unlikely that it could
| be legitimately considered an officer of the court any time soon.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Judge: How does the defendant plea?
|
| Defendant: ChatGPT is at capacity right now.
| Get notified when we're back. Write an acrostic poem
| about the status of ChatGPT. C: ChatGPT is currently
| down. H: Huge demand has caused the site to crash.
| A: All users will have to wait. T: Time is needed for the
| servers to catch up. G: Go grab a coffee and check back
| soon. P: Patience is key in this situation. T:
| Trust that the team is working hard to fix it up.
| jwithington wrote:
| Has anyone who has covered this actually used DoNotPay?
|
| It's just such a poor product. I'm biased towards being pro-AI
| lawyer, but there's no reason to think that an app that can't
| execute the basics will push the technological frontier of the
| legal field.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| Kafka hit the nail on the head with this one: https://www.kafka-
| online.info/before-the-law.html
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd rather have judges at the lower levels rely on some AI
| assistance. The level of utter incompetence that I've witnessed
| personally has been hard to comprehend.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Absolutely atrocious stunt on the part of that company. A
| glorified chatbot is not itself legally accountable or trained
| lawyer and it cannot seriously represent anyone. I assume the
| entire purpose of this was to bait the obvious shutdown and then
| complain on the internet about the legacy lawyers or whatever to
| generate press. Reminds me of the 'sentient AI' Google guy.
|
| Is this going to be the new grift in the industry?
| mach1ne wrote:
| I'm not familiar just how large cases it's supposed to tackle,
| but for small stuff like parking tickets a few solid legal
| arguments may be enough and you don't need to pay for tens of
| hours of lawyer's time.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They're obviously just protecting their turf. Just like the
| Oregon "professional engineers" or whatever.
|
| Compete or legally disallow. When someone chooses the second
| option you know they can't do the first.
| ulizzle wrote:
| We are calling these things A.I, as if they were really
| intelligent; do they understand the concept of qualia?
| 1024core wrote:
| If you are being sued in a court, aren't allowed to defend
| yourself? Can't you act like your own lawyer? Then what's the
| problem in using an AI?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Despite strict procedure and rules, the court is a place for
| human common sense to also intervene. If it walks like a duck
| and quacks like a duck...
|
| In other words, you being a mouthpiece for an AI would likely
| be seen as sufficiently separate enough from "representing
| yourself" as to be not representing yourself at all.
|
| I would imagine, in SCOTUS, were a case argued around allowing
| folks to "represent themselves" like this, one of the first
| questions a justice would ask is "Suppose, instead of an AI
| computer talking through the defendant, an actual practicing
| lawyer was talking through the defendant through the earpiece.
| In that case, is the person still actually representing
| themselves?"
| ghusto wrote:
| This is the first instance of the technology I've seen that made
| sense to me. Sure, for something like law, it actually makes
| sense to have AI-assisted -- or even full AI -- sessions.
|
| Says something about our priorities that _this_ is what gets shut
| down, but the battle that artists are having trying to stop their
| work being used for training, is dismissed as Ludditism.
| brokenodo wrote:
| Aside from the question of whether this plan was legal, DoNotPay
| seems like a terrible product. The results it generates seem
| laughably bad, and it's questionable whether "AI" is actually
| involved when it takes them literal days to generate a document
| for certain types of requests.
| https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l...
| ericd wrote:
| Most of these things seem to be hybrids, humans overseeing
| automation, with varying degrees of human involvement. Guessing
| they at least have a review queue for non-boilerplate docs
| about to go out.
| g_p wrote:
| Indeed - and this is not new. Many years ago, I took a look to
| see what all the fuss was all about.
|
| From start to end, he/his product seemed amateurish. From
| giving out a herokuapp.com subdomain in early press releases
| (which were republished on major sites), that was then no
| longer in use (allowing it to be taken over), through to the
| actual generated output.
|
| When I looked at a letter it generated, it was laughable. The
| "chat bot" was simply asking questions, and capturing the
| (verbatim) response, and throwing it straight into the
| template. No sanity checking, no consistency, etc. There was
| absolutely no conversational ability in the "chat bot" - it was
| the equivalent of a "my first program" Hello World app, asking
| you your name, then greeting you by name.
|
| It wasn't capable of chat, conversation, or comprehension.
| Anything you entered was blindly copied out into the resulting
| letter. Seems nothing has changed.
| the_arun wrote:
| We will soon see AI Physicians, Counsellors etc., Is IBM's Watson
| still in use?
| shireboy wrote:
| Rabbit trail: What is the state of non-ai tech to assist in
| building or defending cases? I vaguely know a thing called
| LexusNexus exists, but not what it does. Is there a system where
| a lawyer can search, find related law, then fill out a form to
| generate a draft case or defense? It seems to my un-lawyer self
| the legal system could be codified into a rules engine: IF these
| legal inputs, THEN these outputs. Or reverse: IF these desired
| outputs, THEN these inputs need to be met.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| Lexis is an information aggregation company. They take a large
| quantity of US law and Court opinions and publish them. These
| sources are then linked together using a relatively simple tag
| style system. I'm general you can get forms for very specific
| and predictable case types, but for a large portion of
| practice, outside of initial filings the fact-specific nature
| of subsequent pleadings are harder to formalize.
| DaTaLa33 wrote:
| We will get rid of them
| joshuaheard wrote:
| "Unauthorized practice of law" only applies to people, not tools.
| AI is a tool. DoNotPay was not selling legal advice, only a tool
| to understand law. It is no different if they were selling a code
| book, or other text that the defendant uses himself. I think the
| real fear is that AI will supplant the entire legal profession.
|
| The legal profession went through a similar struggle when Nolo
| published software that could draft basic legal documents by
| filling in the blanks. Nolo won.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| You are making the assumption that a company advertising a robo
| lawyer isn't engaged in unauthorized practice of law, which is
| rather odd since I bet the Nolo books don't hold themselves out
| as a lawyer, robo or otherwise.
|
| You are also making the assumption any tool is allowed in a
| courtroom, which is obviously not correct. You wouldn't be able
| to use a nolo book while testifying what you witnessed at a
| crime scene, either.
| shmerl wrote:
| _> As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various
| state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters
| began to pour in. _
|
| So an organization with the sole purpose of gatekeeping and anti-
| competitive market control does the anti-competitive market
| control. Why is this bar idea itself still legal?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, the comments about the company not doing things correctly
| (licensing the algorithm), are correct.
|
| It's actually critically important to have some kind of license
| to represent people in court, as well as someone to pillory, if
| they screw up, as it prevents some _truly_ evil stuff from
| happening (I have seen _many_ people robbed blind by licensed
| lawyers, and it would be a thousand times worse, if they could be
| represented by anyone that sounds convincing enough). The stakes
| are really high, and we shouldn 't mess around (not in all cases,
| of course, but it would really suck, if someone got the needle,
| because a programmer forgot a semicolon).
|
| That said, I think it's only a matter of time, before a
| significant amount of legal stuff is handled by AI. AI shines, in
| environments with lots of structure and rules; which pretty much
| defines the law.
| tahoeskibum wrote:
| But then again, Chat GPT just passed law school exams, albeit at
| C+ in blind testing.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/ind...
| Maursault wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| And when the AI starts fabricating fictitious citations for
| cases, disbar it, and ban it and its developers from practicing
| law?
| daveslash wrote:
| 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" ;)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| AI is able to sometimes make a valid argument, but when it comes
| to specific facts and rules it drops the ball. Expert knowledge
| requires actual understanding, not fitting patterns and
| transposing words. Take a look at the following vid from a real
| expert in a paticular field (military submarines). Look at how
| ChatGPT falls appart when discussing "Akula" subs. It can read
| english but clearly does not understand what that word means in
| context. It also confidently cites incorrect facts, something
| that would be very dangerous in any court.
|
| Hint: Akula is a nato reporting name. Nobody calls them the shark
| class of subs, even russians attach that name to a very different
| class.
|
| https://youtu.be/H8DIwNfIijU
| 71a54xd wrote:
| I wonder why he didn't continue to apply pressure to go ahead,
| and worse case scenario just flee to europe if in-fact angry
| prosecutors actually tried to jail him.
|
| Ironically, the outcome of this whole saga is the most _lawyer_
| outcome it could 've been... by way of Lawyers advocating to keep
| legal protection out of reach from the common man and inserting
| themselves between real innovation and progress for financial
| gain.
| [deleted]
| squarefoot wrote:
| AI lawyers indeed look scary, but I can't but think of the
| implications should they become one day way cheaper than carbon
| based ones. Imagine all those cases where $BIGCORP is technically
| in the wrong, but today can screw some poor sap just by dragging
| things until he can't afford legal defense anymore.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| The $BIGCORP can use the tool too, it's not exactly asymmetric.
| Imagine what a patent troll could accomplish with something
| like this if it were allowed.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm guessing that this tech won't end up creating equality for
| poor people in the justice system.
|
| Either it won't work as well as actual lawyers in which case it
| will become the only option poor people have (basically
| replacing public defenders), or it will work just as well as
| human representation (or even better), in which case 'AI
| lawyer' companies will charge just as much if not more for
| their services as the human lawyers do.
|
| DoNotPay may be a humble start up now, but if the tech proves
| to be effective they (and other future AI companies) will
| eventually fleece their customers just as human lawyers do
| today. Not because they have to, or because it is in any way
| justified, but just because they can and doing it would make
| them richer.
| sh4rks wrote:
| What about when the lawyer tech becomes open source and you
| can have your own personal lawyer in your pocket at all
| times?
| squarefoot wrote:
| Open Source _and_ disconnected. AI is a wonderful tool that
| will turn into a nightmare when used to take advantage of
| people. I wouldn 't want my "pocket lawyer" to send our
| private conversations anywhere but my personal offline
| space. The risk that someone with vested interests and
| enough funds could bribe their access to that data, if not
| directly to the AI, is simply too high. Unfortunately it
| seems that trustworthy AI is not going to happen anytime
| soon: there's simply too much money to make renting it as a
| service, hence online and closed.
| PostOnce wrote:
| You can't just start practicing law without a license, you'll
| ruin somebody's life; they'll assume you, or the computer, knows
| what is going on, when in fact you just want Free Dollars.
|
| I don't want Dr. iPad Joe who spent a grand total of 15 minutes
| learning how to use ChatGPT making legal, medical, engineering,
| or other important decisions for me or the place I live.
|
| Now, I am of course free to use ChatGPT as a private person to
| "come up with my own legal arguments", but should a company be
| allowed to sell me a ChatGPT lawyer? No. They shouldn't be
| allowed to sell me unlabelled asbestos products either.
|
| I know we all hate regulations, but _some_ of them exist for a
| reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had
| regulations.
| eru wrote:
| > I know we all hate regulations, but some of them exist for a
| reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had
| regulations.
|
| That's not the only reason regulations exist.
|
| And most 'Bad Shit' can already be dealt with via existing
| rules, instead of specific new regulations. But making new
| rules sounds good to the voters and can also be a powergrab.
| 0xy wrote:
| This position means nobody gets adequate legal representation
| unless they are wealthy, so essentially just 'screw poor
| people'.
|
| Who's more likely to get out of a wrongful charge? A wealthy
| millionaire spending $1,000/hour on fancy lawyers or a poor guy
| who's public defender had 1 hour to look into his case?
|
| AI levels the playing field, and anyone campaigning against
| wants poor people to continue to get railroaded.
| belter wrote:
| Wait until you hear about this Electric Car company, using real
| people to beta test untried self driving software, on Real
| roads against other drivers and pedestrians...
| rcme wrote:
| I find the need for lawyers a tragedy. Interactions with the
| judicial system are often some of the most important events in
| a person's life. The fact that it's necessary to pay someone
| hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to help navigate the
| arcane process is sad and shouldn't be necessary. It would be
| one thing if laws were meaningfully written down, so that
| anyone could read the statutes and build their own argument,
| but the laws are not written down in a way that has meaning
| unless you are willing to wade through centuries of case law.
| roenxi wrote:
| Professional advocates aren't a result of any specific legal
| system - if I'm at risk of having my life's savings and
| achievements summarily destroyed then I want someone of
| waaaaay above average verbal and emotional intelligence, who
| is thinking clearly and not under any pressure themselves,
| explaining why that shouldn't happen.
|
| There is a problem where the laws so complex and numerous it
| is no longer practical to understand them or follow them all.
| People have a bias and don't seem very good at separating
| "good idea in the current context" from "thing that should be
| legally required". Let alone navigating the complexity of the
| phrase "cost benefit analysis". Anyone who lives life while
| obeying all laws to the letter is at a serious disadvantage
| to the average human - although since it is impossible to
| know what all the laws are it is unlikely anyone could do
| this.
|
| But that arcanery isn't what drives the need for lawyers.
| You'd have to be crazy to engage with something as powerful
| and erratic as a legal system on your own. And crazy people
| do frequently represent themselves already.
| db48x wrote:
| In part I understand what you mean. I think it is extremely
| important that courtroom procedure doesn't get so complex
| that it is impossible for an individual to cope with. In
| practice a lot of judges go out of their way to make self-
| representation possible. However, I don't think that having
| professional lawyers represents a tragedy. Specialization is
| very important, and we would all be worse off without it.
|
| Teaching is even more important, and we use professional
| teachers. Building a house is also an important moment in our
| lives, and most people would do well to accept the advice of
| a professional architect.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| Yeah but the rules that govern our lives in society
| shouldn't need a phd to understand.
|
| There are often daily situations where both citizens and
| police don't know really know what the law is.
|
| Reform is proven to be really hard. But that's the tragedy.
|
| For instance taxes shouldn't really be more complicated
| then filling in a simple automated form. Also for
| businesses. And it should really be the burden of the
| government taxing that it's all clear. But it's not and
| it's a mess and the burden is put on the people.
| pirate787 wrote:
| This is by design. Governmental systems are "captured" by
| special interests and made intentionally obtuse and
| complex as a barrier to entry. Lawyers and judges are a
| guild that works to make the law complex and extract
| rents from the productive economy. Over 1/3 of the U.S.
| Congress are attorneys as well.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I honestly don't think there is such a malicious intent
| behind it. Perhaps in some small instances.
|
| Generally, the fact of the matter is simply that law is
| highly complex and the way it evolves is almost always by
| creating new laws, not getting rid of old ones. That's
| unfortunate obviously, but just like you don't just
| rewrite the Linux kernel, you can't just reset the legal
| foundation.
| rcme wrote:
| Some, and maybe most, of the complexity is organic. But
| there are specific instances, like the tax code, that
| have been kept intentionally complex at the bequest of
| special interest groups.
|
| And of course, laws are made mostly by lawyers. So they
| don't have much of an incentive to change things.
| personjerry wrote:
| I disagree, I think for important things like the rules
| that govern us (i.e. the legal system) we need to be able
| to fully understand and interact with them. Imagine if
| voting was so complicated that you had to pay someone to
| vote for you!
|
| Likewise, taxes should be simple and understandable and
| doable. Don't undersell our importance as citizens; We
| should demand more because we deserve well!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Imagine if computing was so complicated that you had to
| pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to
| program for you.
| hnfong wrote:
| > Imagine if voting was so complicated that you had to
| pay someone to vote for you
|
| I think they call this "representative democracy".
| iinnPP wrote:
| It is already far too complex for the average American. In
| other words, it is already too complex.
|
| In fact, it is so complex for the average IQ that even some
| judges can't do it right, even the basics.
| mandmandam wrote:
| The American legal system is broken to a Lovecraftian
| degree.
|
| The complexity is intentional - it's to make lawyers the
| maximum possible money while avoiding maximum
| accountability.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price
| point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone
| else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law
| jurisdictions, too)?
|
| Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves
| (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in
| their life is somehow "wrong").
| brigandish wrote:
| We all use technology to treat ourselves in lieu of a
| surgeon all the time, whether it's a Google search, a
| plaster, or cough medicine or whatever. Are you going to
| give up all the advances that differentiate your situation
| from that of someone in say, 17th century Europe, because
| an expert _should_ do it _because they 're an expert_?
|
| No thanks. I'll take advances that make things easy enough
| to avoid experts wherever I can get it and leave the
| bloodlettings (which, with lawyers, will be from your bank
| account) to others.
| db48x wrote:
| That's not what he said. The key word there was
| _operate_, not _use a band-aid_. I wouldn't recommend
| trying to take out your own appendix; it's a really bad
| idea.
| bloak wrote:
| On the other hand:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov
|
| (If it had been filmed, the video would probably be on
| YouTube with Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" as the
| soundtrack.)
| lmm wrote:
| > Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the
| price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of
| someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-
| case law jurisdictions, too)?
|
| Even needing an expert at all is an issue - the law that
| governs society needs to be accessible to members of
| society, long before they reach the point of litigation.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| It might also be a function of legal tradition/system. In
| some places laws are quite easy to read for me, in others
| I find it much tougher (as a non-lawyer).
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point"
|
| Both, but for most people it is simply the price point, so
| this is the more important issue.
|
| I think no one has a problem, that when setting up
| complicated contracts with multiple persons involved, a
| legal expert is necessary, but for very basic things, it
| should not be, but rather the laws should be more clear and
| simple.
| aaaaaA3 wrote:
| >Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves
| (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in
| their life is somehow "wrong").
|
| Not operate, but since over here in Europe just about any
| piece of paper passes as a prescription, I tend to print my
| own. (Most people don't know this, but EU pharmacies are
| required to accept prescriptions from other EU countries.
| There's no standard format or verification procedure, so
| forgery is trivial even if your country has a more secure
| domestic system)
|
| What's the point of going to (or even calling) a doctor for
| an antibiotics prescription? It's not like they're going to
| perform blood tests before prescribing. Want some Cialis
| for the weekend? Why go to a doctor? You can just pull up
| the contraindications on Google. Why bother doctor shopping
| for Ozempic? Just print your own prescription.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| At least in Switzerland, I always had to have blood tests
| done before the doctor would prescribe anti-biotics. The
| core issue you have is with the doctor prescribing things
| willy-nilly.
| aaaaaA4 wrote:
| That might be a thing in some EU countries, but it's
| certainly not the norm across the EU. You can still buy
| antibiotics without a prescription in many EU countries,
| for example in Spain it's entirely dependent on the
| pharmacist.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Wait, what? I can just print a foreign prescription for
| Adderall or Dilaudid and the pharmacy will accept it? I
| don't think that would work...
| brrrrrt wrote:
| It depends on the country, usually there are national
| rules requiring special prescriptions for "fun" drugs
| like that.
|
| If you can pick up drugs like that with an ordinary
| private prescription in your country, a foreign
| prescription should work.
|
| For further information:
|
| https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/prescription
| -me...
|
| https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/prescription
| -me...
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Pretty sure, sometimes a doctor might know more than you
| on a prescription or their educated guess on which
| antibiotic is appropriate is better than yours, for
| example.
| aaaaaA3 wrote:
| Hey, I definitely agree.
|
| On the other hand, every time I've gone to the doctor
| with a cold, I've always been prescribed the same
| antibiotic after basically no examination.
|
| If I had some new, unexpected symptoms, I'd probably want
| to at least call the doctor.
| scatters wrote:
| You do realize that antibiotics are completely
| ineffective against a cold? You're wrecking your
| digestive system and risking antibiotic resistance for
| nothing. If your doctor is prescribing antibiotics,
| either they're a terrible doctor, or they're a bad doctor
| and you're a worse patient.
| aaaaaA4 wrote:
| Yes, sorry. That's just language barrier raising it's
| head. What I meant was strep throat, obviously there's
| not much of a point in taking antibiotics for a viral
| infection.
|
| I don't need a doctor to inspect my tonsils, I have
| access to a phone with a flashlight.
|
| And for what it's worth, I think I've taken antibiotics
| twice in the past 4 years. Always according to the
| instructions on the packaging.
| rcme wrote:
| > because the need for a surgeon in an important event in
| their life is somehow "wrong"
|
| Most countries try to guarantee access to a surgeon when
| one is needed.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Where I live, insurance for civil litigation is actually
| pretty cheap. For criminal cases, my understanding is
| that in a lot of places you will be given a lawyer if you
| cannot pay for one as a defendant.
| lmm wrote:
| They've been slowly bleeding those systems dry, putting
| caps on how much they'll pay and restricting who gets
| access.
| madsbuch wrote:
| In Denmark there is "fri process" that will ensure a
| lawyer is provided when really needed and you can't
| afford it - my guess is that other countries have similar
| systems.
| iinnPP wrote:
| The problem is that, most of the time, those lawyers are
| so loaded with cases that they cannot provide you full
| representation.
|
| Ask any US Federal DA or US Federal Public Defender who
| you know to be honest. Any.
|
| It may differ in your country, but it is unlikely.
| madsbuch wrote:
| > It may differ in your country, but it is unlikely.
|
| It differs in my country, and it is very likely. The US
| follows an anglo approach to law. No country in the EU
| follows that - I do understand that it is the easiest to
| assume that other countries work like you expect, though
| not very productive.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Most countries also give you a lawyer if you need it, no?
| Like, you get public defenders in the US?
| rcme wrote:
| Not for civil cases. And the reputation of public
| defenders for criminal cases is not particularly good.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Just move to a country not based on case law?
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is a tricky situation, but it seems like it should be
| possible if structured as a "McKenzie friend":
| https://www.legalchoices.org.uk/types-of-lawyers/other-
| lawye... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_friend
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Except this aint it.
|
| "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. The
| system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including
| ChatGPT and DaVinci."
|
| I.e its equivalent of a person effectively studying the actual
| law and then representing themselves in court, just in a more
| optimal manner.
|
| Even if it fails, it was supposed to be something trivial like
| a speeding ticket, because after all, this is a test.
|
| And funny enough, the answer of will it work has already been
| answered. If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would
| just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it.
| Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much
| proves that they are full of shit and they know it.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > I.e its equivalent of a person effectively studying the
| actual law and then representing themselves in court, just in
| a more optimal manner.
|
| It's not equivalent at all. ChatGPT and DaVinci have not
| "studied the law" in the same way as any human would.
|
| > If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put
| a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it
| from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that
| they are full of shit and they know it.
|
| This is a traffic ticket case. He's not up against Sullivan &
| Cromwell, he's up against some local prosecutor. I'm sure if
| some white shoe law firm were being paid hundreds of
| thousands to defend a case against a guy using ChatGPT,
| they'd be fine with it.
|
| Even though we have an adversarial system, the state can't
| just let ordinary folk hang themselves with cheap half-baked
| "solutions". It would be unjust/bad press (delete as
| appropriate to your level of cynicism). That's why we have
| licensing requirements, etc.
| xienze wrote:
| > the state can't just let ordinary folk hang themselves
| with cheap half-baked "solutions".
|
| Why hasn't the practice of self-representation been banned
| then? It's almost without exception a surefire way to hang
| oneself in a court room.
| notahacker wrote:
| Self representation doesn't involve some mountebank
| selling you a "robot lawyer that will get you off your
| parking ticket" solution
| rkachowski wrote:
| What's the difference between self representation and
| practicing law without a license - is there an exemption
| for unlicensed practitioners when they are performing on
| their own behalf, or this is a distinct category somehow?
| xienze wrote:
| So what if I just decided of my own accord to use ChatGPT
| and train it myself? Or someone on GitHub made a fully
| trained version of it available in a Docker container,
| for free?
| notahacker wrote:
| Then nobody would issue legal threats to you for selling
| "Robot Lawyer" services. But you probably wouldn't get
| permission to use Google Glass in the courtroom either,
| so you'd have to commit your legal arguments to memory as
| well as hoping the AI hadn't ingested too much "freeman
| of the land" nonsense...
| eloisant wrote:
| I see that as a tool, I'm not sure why it's presented as "AI
| being the lawyer".
|
| You're allowed to represent yourself in court, most of the time
| (and for parking ticket I'm pretty sure) you have no obligation
| to have a lawyer. Now if you want to pay for a tool that helps
| you represent yourself better, why not?
| notahacker wrote:
| > I see that as a tool, I'm not sure why it's presented as
| "AI being the lawyer".
|
| The hero element for the product's home page describes it as
| "The World's First Robot Lawyer". Twice.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| I had the same thought, but I guess if you're paying someone
| for legal counsel then they need to be held responsible for
| the service they are giving, however they give it. That's
| qualitatively different from buying a legal textbook and
| advising yourself from it, since you are the one deriving
| counsel to yourself from generally available information.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Can you please find me a licensed lawyer for less than the
| price of a parking ticket?
| charcircuit wrote:
| How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin someone's
| life?
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I used to drive a cab and people would tell me why they were
| in the cab quite often.
|
| My favorite was this guy who got a ticket on a _bicycle_ for
| not having a headlight, moved out of state and ten years
| later had his car impounded for driving without a license
| because they apparently suspended it for getting (or, more
| correctly, not paying) a ticket he got on a bicycle.
|
| I'm guessing he never tried changing his license to the new
| state because Arizona licenses are good until you're 65.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| ChatGPT lies. It makes up facts, sources, and nonsense
| arguments.
|
| Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go
| from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you
| start lying in court.
|
| ChatGPT also assumes you're speaking the truth. If you ask it
| about a topic and say "that's wrong, the actual facts are..."
| then it'll change argumentation to support your position. You
| probably don't want your legal representation to become your
| prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, but notebooks are allowed in court and you could
| spill water on your notebook and confuse an 8 for a 0 and
| then read it out to court and it would be a lie.
|
| Lying to judges is bad, so notebooks should be banned.
| Likewise, anything typed should be banned because we could
| have hit the wrong key, causing you to lie to the judge.
| xienze wrote:
| > Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go
| from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you
| start lying in court.
|
| Then I suppose that's just the risk the defendant takes,
| isn't it? Let people use ChatGPT, if the rope they're given
| ends up hanging enough people, that'll be the end of that,
| won't it?
|
| Also, everyone is ignoring the possibility that this same
| person could've had ChatGPT generate a script (general
| outline of arguments, "what do I say if asked this" type of
| stuff), memorized it, and used that to guide his self-
| defense. Fundamentally, no difference. No one would've
| known, and no one would've objected.
|
| To me, this move is less "oh we need to protect people from
| getting bad legal advice from a robot" and "we're not even
| gonna let this thing be used a single time in court to keep
| our job from being automated."
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| > _Fundamentally, no difference. No one would 've known,
| and no one would've objected._
|
| I'm not a legal professional but it seems obvious to me
| that there is a fundamental difference, namely the one
| you describe just before that sentence. The whole legal
| system is built around and under the assumption that all
| kinds of people want to trick it, and judges tend to be
| allergic to this kind of reasoning. Memorizing legal
| arguments and getting live legal advise from earphones in
| your glasses are not the same thing. Besides,even lawyers
| are advised not to defend themselves in court, and it
| would be generally very bad advise for anyone to do so.
| xienze wrote:
| > Memorizing legal arguments and getting live legal
| advise from earphones in your glasses are not the same
| thing.
|
| Only in the strictest sense. Let's say the person
| memorizing ChatGPT's directions handles their case in the
| exact same manner as if it was being relayed to them live
| (i.e., the set of statements/questions from the judge
| lined up perfectly with what ChatGPT presented in its
| script). What then? Same outcome, different delivery
| method. We're kind of splitting hairs with the "live
| legal advise" thing. The defendant could bring a pile of
| law books with him and consult those without anyone
| blinking an eye. The objection seems to boil down to
| "well OK, if you want to represent yourself you better
| not consult an intelligent system to help you form your
| defense." Why not though? Seems more about job protection
| than anything else.
|
| > Besides,even lawyers are advised not to defend
| themselves in court, and it would be generally very bad
| advise for anyone to do so.
|
| And I say: let people discover the downside of using
| ChatGPT for defense if it's so inept. Bad outcomes are
| the best way to prevent widespread usage, not pre-emptive
| bans in the interest of keeping people from shooting
| themselves in the foot.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Honest tangent that I'm dying to find an answer for. Is the
| assumption of truthful prompts something openAI decided
| should be there, or is the assumption something very deeply
| baked into this sort of language model? Could they make an
| argumentative, opinionated, arrogant asshole version of
| chatGPT if they simply let it off its leash?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go
| from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you
| start lying in court.
|
| If you knowingly lie because ChatGPT told you to that's on
| you. If you said something that you believed was true
| because ChatGPT said it to you then that's not perjury,
| it's just being wrong.
|
| > You probably don't want your legal representation to
| become your prosecutor when they use the right type of
| phrasing.
|
| When the worst case scenario is having to pay the parking
| fine, it might be worth taking this risk to avoid paying a
| lawyer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin
| someone's life?
|
| The downside of contesting a traffic ticket is not "failing
| to get rid of the ticket". The ticket amount amounts to a no
| contest plea bargain offer, not the maximum penalty for the
| offense, not to mentiom the potential _additional_ penalties
| for violating court rules.
| sitkack wrote:
| Unpaid traffic tickets are probably many people's gateway to
| their first arrest warrant. Then once in the system it is
| hard to escape. It is a real thing.
|
| https://brunolaw.com/resources/general-criminal-law/what-
| to-...
|
| Then once this process starts you automatically get
| * Suspended driver's license * Ineligible to renew your
| driver's license * Ineligible to register your vehicle
| * Vehicle being towed and impounded * Increased
| insurance premiums
|
| Interactions with the state are serious business
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| In what countries do unpaid parking tickets justify _arrest
| warrants_? That 's seriously insane.
| gambiting wrote:
| Traffic tickets and parking tickets are two different
| things though. Unpaid parking ticket is unlikely to get
| you arrested anywhere, but an unpaid speeding ticket will
| eventually lead to some pretty unpleasant consequences
| which yes, might include arrest(to bring you in front of
| the judge and explain yourself).
| charcircuit wrote:
| Losing the case doesn't mean you won't pay the ticket.
| gambiting wrote:
| It absolutely can do.
|
| For instance, as I discovered recently going through this
| process myself - here in UK when applying for British
| citizenship you have to disclose any court orders against
| you. Now here's a thing - if you were given a ticket for
| speeding, accepted it and paid it then that's it, no harm
| done. If it's less than 3 tickets in the last 5 years then
| you don't even need to list it on the application form.
|
| However, if you went to court to contest it and _lost_ , then
| you now have a court order against you - and that's an
| automatic 3 year ban on British citizenship applications, and
| even after that you always have to list it as a thing that
| happened and it can be used to argue you are of "bad
| character" and be used to deny you the citizenship.
|
| So yes, failing to get rid of a traffic ticket(in the court
| of law) can absolutely ruin your life.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This only applies to a small group of people and that risk
| is known up front. If it's that important that they win
| they can not use this.
| gambiting wrote:
| How is this known upfront? I've lived for over a decade
| in this country without knowing this, until I actually
| applied for my citizenship last year. I'm just lucky I
| never went to court to contest a speeding ticket(because
| I never got any) or I could have screwed myself over
| without even knowing.
|
| Also define "small group" - nearly 200k people apply for
| British citizenship annually, and I bet most of them have
| no idea contesting a traffic ticket can cost them a
| chance at becoming citizens.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Today, parking ticket. Tomorrow, DUI. Next week, a murder
| case.
|
| It's about putting the first wedge in.
| charcircuit wrote:
| As the AI gets better people will trust it with more and
| more kinds of cases and cases with more increased
| complexity. If people want to pay for a real licensed
| lawyer they are still able to do so.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > As the AI gets better people will trust it
|
| AI is just informed search, a dwarf sitting on shoulders
| of human knowledge. There were medical "expert systems"
| in 2000s, yet we still have doctors.
|
| In my understanding, in most cases AI will be a glorified
| assistant, not an authoritative decision-maker. Otherwise
| in collides head-on with barriers and semis. I won't
| trust such system even with a parking ticket, yet alone
| my life.
|
| We're just at the top of a hype-cycle now. AI can do new
| things, but not as well as we dream or hope.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Whatever it is, it's getting better.
|
| And lots of people would rather have a glorified
| assistant than nothing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Whatever it is, it's getting better.
|
| Yeah, telling grammatically correct but factually wrong
| things, having biases, crashing into things, and whatnot.
|
| > And lots of people would rather have a glorified
| assistant than nothing.
|
| An assistant which can't be checked for accuracy, or for
| telling the truth.
|
| _The future is bright!_
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Yeah, telling grammatically correct but factually wrong
| things, having biases, crashing into things, and whatnot.
|
| If you don't think it's right more often, please go poke
| an older model. Especially look at the ability to stay on
| topic.
|
| > An assistant which can't be checked for accuracy, or
| for telling the truth.
|
| What do you mean "can't be checked"? And any kind of
| assistant can make mistakes.
|
| And calling it an assistant was _your idea_.
| vel0city wrote:
| Any kind of assistant can make mistakes. But a human
| assistant can be made to show their work and explain
| their reasoning to check their output. If ChatGPT says
| "this thing is totally legal" or "don't worry about that
| rash", how am I to validate it's "reasoning"? How do I
| know where it's drawing it's inference from?
| gwd wrote:
| --->8
|
| ChatGPT: "Your honor, that couldn't have been me, as I drive
| a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing
| a mountain at the time.."
|
| Defendant: "Your honor, that couldn't have been my, as I
| drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal
| climbing a mountain at the time."
|
| Prosecutor: "Um, this photo clearly shows your face in this
| blue minivan, and there's no evidence you've been to Nepal."
|
| Judge: "I'm holding you in contempt of court, and sentence
| you to 7 days in jail for perjury."
|
| 8<----
|
| I don't think the argument is that AI _is never allowed_ to
| represent someone in court; just that before it happens, a
| sufficient amount of vetting must be done. At a bare minimum,
| the legal AI needs to know not to lead the defendant to
| perjure themselves.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think the way forward might be an arbitration case, where
| they pay an actual legal expert in the right position to
| make binding decisions outside of the context of the normal
| law system.
|
| In voluntary arbitration, you can bend the rules a lot more
| than in an actual court case.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I would 100% lay the blame with the defendant in that
| instance though.
| epups wrote:
| I think the stakes are not that high in this particular
| application. I see it as something akin to Turbotax, it helps
| you navigate a difficult environment but you should also
| exercise judgement to not screw everything up.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Yes but if this were legal, it would set a precedent, and
| soon these companies would be trying to use it in divorce
| cases and eventually criminal law.
|
| Money only stops when forced to by regulators.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Or do what the rest of the world does and make the (tax)
| environment simpler for the average person.
|
| Turbotax, Quicken, etc, is a great warning, those companies
| lobby to increase complexity of trivial matters (like
| personal tax returns). The same companies will do this with
| 'trivial' legal matters, and the only way forward is to buy
| their software.
| jedberg wrote:
| "The justice system moves swiftly now that they've abolished all
| lawyers!"
|
| -- Doc Brown in 2015, Back to the Future
|
| I look forward to the day when cases are argued on both sides by
| an AI to an AI judge. It should work about as well as Google
| customer service!
|
| But seriously, having the AI do the arguing is silly. AI should
| be a tool. I see no issue using an AI to inform a lawyer who can
| use what it outputs to make their case stronger, but just using
| an AI seems fraught with peril.
| minhazm wrote:
| This whole thing was clearly a marketing stunt, they knew from
| the beginning they wouldn't be able to do it but they got a ton
| of free publicity out of it.
| raydiatian wrote:
| What we have here is humans responding to change how they learned
| to.
|
| In the face of impending AI changes, software engineers build
| start ups and try to adapt hoping to capture some relevance.
|
| In the face of impending AI changes, lawyers threaten litigation.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Gross simplification.
|
| > 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. The system relied on a few leading AI text
| generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci.
|
| - Recording court proceedings is already a big no in many
| countries around the world.
|
| - Licensed activity is licensed activity. IBM Watson did not
| practice medicine it provided advisory information to licensed
| doctors, the onus of the decision is with the doctors. Much in
| the same way Joshua Browder could have done better due
| diligence and concluded that he could create a service to
| advise lawyers but could not create a service in replacement of
| lawyers.
|
| - Joshua probably already knew all of this and is trying to
| advertise and/or gather funding for his company.
|
| IANAL etc.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Ahaha
| msla wrote:
| > Recording court proceedings is already a big no in many
| countries around the world.
|
| You certainly can't have someone able to challenge the
| official record of what happened.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The official record taken word for word by the
| stenographer? Why would you need to challenge that? Are you
| implying something that's more than one in a million?
| msla wrote:
| > Why would you need to challenge that?
|
| That's precisely the question, yes.
|
| > Are you implying something that's more than one in a
| million?
|
| Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
| raydiatian wrote:
| The civil exception handler.
|
| "I'll see you in catch!"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > That's precisely the question, yes.
|
| Don't be vague on purpose. Say what you're implying.
|
| > Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
|
| Usually they still are. But I'm talking about things
| being very rare _among court cases_. Do you think there
| is a systemic problem of false court transcripts? And I
| _really_ don 't think such a thing is the _reason_ not to
| allow recording.
| msla wrote:
| We do certain things to avoid the image of impropriety.
|
| We also look askance at people who refuse to allow
| oversight into their work.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That oversight is a big part of why the court reporter
| exists, and has existed since long before recording
| technology was invented. Keeping things the same is not a
| refusal of oversight.
| 451mov wrote:
| I read this as "real lawyers shut down chatGPT in court room" not
| that lawyers prevented it from even actually happening.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Good. Totally fine with trying to use AI to give legal advice,
| but it should be done with a lawyer's license on the line. A
| company that explicitly disclaims being a law firm and states is
| not giving legal advice should also not get to tweet that they
| are "representing" someone in court.
|
| A good bar (pun intended) for the quality of the tech is if it is
| good enough that a licensed attorney trusts it to give legal
| advice with their livelihood at stake. If this product doesn't
| work for DoNotPay, they can just walk away and do something else,
| as they are doing anyways here. If it doesn't work for a lawyer,
| they'd get sued for malpractice and possibly disbarred, ruining
| their career. When someone trusts it to that level, have at it.
| gunshai wrote:
| 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 normal not rich folks to get on
| with their lives.
|
| the costs involved in legal are so ridiculous, our society
| basically encourages blind folding ourselves to most business
| ethical standards in hopes that our product demands a high
| enough margin to then pay for what ever legal fuck ups that
| cost too much to figure out on the front end.
| fardo wrote:
| >Lawyers cost money a lot of money. AI lawyers can help lower
| those barriers to entry.
|
| For traffic court, perhaps, but these AI tools don't seem
| guaranteed to not make this problem worse at broader scales.
|
| These AIs will also be available to large firms, who are
| equally incentivized to use AI for augmenting argumentation
| through existing lawyers, but will also be incentivized to
| train their own walled garden powerful models in a way that
| poorer clients still would likely not have access to, and
| which individuals and smaller firms will not have the
| resources to train themselves.
|
| These kinds of AI models could very easily serve to entrench
| and raise the cost of a defense by making it so you not only
| need a lawyer, you need a lawyer-backed-by-a-firm-with-a-LLM
| to be competitive at trial - making all existing problems
| even worse.
| gunshai wrote:
| >walled garden powerful models in a way that poorer clients
| still would likely not have access to
|
| Even if that becomes the case, this is some how worse than
| what we have now?
|
| >raise the cost of a defense
|
| Highly doubtful
|
| > you need a lawyer-backed-by-a-firm-with-a-LLM to be
| competitive at trial - making all existing problems even
| worse.
|
| First, most things don't go to trial so you're completely
| missing the cost savings associated with avoiding trial
| because of these types of AI assisted scenarios.
|
| Second, the cost associated with training models will go
| down. The cost of a Harvard law degree has ... never gone
| down.
| elicksaur wrote:
| 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.
| gunshai wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Do you imagine that a pro se litigant is going to have a hard
| time or will be required to spend small fortunes to defend
| themselves in "fucking traffic court?"
|
| You're basically trying to cut the argument both ways.
| Administrative courts are not criminal courts, and an AI
| would never be allowed near a criminal defense trial for
| obvious reasons.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes because a lawyer costs their hourly rate whether it's
| traffic or criminal court. Or more generally as an economy
| wide trend -- paying a human to do something is often the
| most expensive route you can take.
|
| We're talking about traffic tickets that are usually in the
| hundred dollar range. If anyone is going to court rather
| than just paying it, it's because $100 is a non-trivial
| amount of money to them.
|
| It doesn't have to be AI lawyers but any change to the
| system that reduces the total amount of work needed to be
| done by humans is a win.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > but it should be done with a lawyer's license on the line.
|
| Either that, or the client is fully aware they are defending
| themselves with the help of an AI that's not, and cannot at the
| moment be, a lawyer. As much as I want to believe AGI is just
| around the corner, LLMs are not individuals with human-level
| intelligence.
| asciimov wrote:
| It's too bad programmers don't also have some sort of licensure
| as well. It would be helpful in keeping humans employed in
| creating and maintaining code, instead of letting AI run off
| with all our jobs.
| renlo wrote:
| What do you believe licensure would solve?
| asciimov wrote:
| It would help in having some sort of body that says, we
| want to have humans involved in the chain of responsibility
| when creating code and not willfully hand over the control
| to AI.
| rubylark wrote:
| Would that not be the person running the AI? The one
| giving prompts and verifying that prompts are fulfilled
| adequately?
| asciimov wrote:
| If I've learned anything, its people often never verify
| the correctness of anything automated.
| blitzar wrote:
| The Ai robot lost the argument to be permitted to argue in court.
| [deleted]
| axpy906 wrote:
| Upvoted. We need to automate lawyers. My vote is for this.
| amelius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
| monkeydust wrote:
| Hardly surprising, you try to automate lawyers they are going to
| get litigious.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think lawyers will be at pains to demonstrate how laughably
| bad the AI is when pushed. I don't blame them.
| ilyt wrote:
| Eh, it would probably beat some bad lawyers
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| And a heck of a lot of lazy prosecutors who are just
| accustomed to winning because the proles aren't supposed to
| know the technicalities.
| taylorius wrote:
| That's stage two. If the blanket ban-via-threatening-letters
| doesn't work.
| JoBrad wrote:
| Here's a Twitter thread where a lawyer used their service for a
| few items. The results are significantly subpar. The noise
| about criminal referrals is just cover for the fact that their
| service was so bad, in my opinion.
|
| https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly, Unsurprising that DoNotPay was going to get sued to
| the ground and had to back out.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Its too bad they didn't have a competent AI lawyer they could
| hace used to review their plan for gaping holes like
| violating the state unauthorized practice of law statute and
| local courtroom rules.
|
| If they had, they could have saved thrmselves a lot of
| trouble, or designed a less-illegal publicity stunt.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I always found lawyers to be interesting... they are not
| responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your case.
| But if they mess up, that doesn't send them to jail. You can fire
| them or report them. But that's it. You're still screwed.
|
| Really the only one in the court working for you, is yourself. So
| ideally we'd make it easier to represent yourself. As long as
| your capable of doing such.
|
| I quite like this idea, since ChatGPT could be setup to work for
| you. Provide you with 100% of the possible resolutions to your
| case and you can pick the one you want to go with. And if your
| argument is wrong it's your fault. They can suggest or recommend
| a specific one or something. Same as a lawyer would.
| smorrebrod wrote:
| I don't know if that's what you're talking about but you can
| sue your lawyer for professional negligence if they didn't do
| their job properly.
| mandmandam wrote:
| This isn't quite true.
|
| You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were
| going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you ten
| thousand dollars just to begin the process.
|
| So if there's any doubt that you're going to win - any at all
| - your own $600/hr lawyer can flat out fuck you over. And
| there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it.
| rcme wrote:
| > You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were
| going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you
| ten thousand dollars just to begin the process.
|
| That's not true. For instance, missing a filing deadline is
| considered professional negligence, regardless of the
| strength of the case.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Thanks! That might be very important info.
|
| However, there seems to still be the caveat that missing
| that deadline needs to have "caused you harm" - which
| entails proving that you would have won your case
| otherwise, no?
| rcme wrote:
| At a minimum, you'd be entitled to any fees paid to the
| lawyer regardless of the outcome.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| Following your line of thought, I would love it if software
| engineers lost all their personal privacy every time their
| product got hacked or was built to spy on others.
|
| What can I say? I'm a dreamer.
| eru wrote:
| > I always found lawyers to be interesting... they are not
| responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your
| case. But if they mess up, that doesn't send them to jail. You
| can fire them or report them. But that's it. You're still
| screwed.
|
| A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you
| either.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you
| either.
|
| She can be sued and lose her license.
| watwut wrote:
| Same actually goes for layers. They can lose the license or
| be otherwise sanctioned by court.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| That's _extremely_ rare, despite medical malpractice being
| the third leading cause of death in America.
|
| https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_s
| u...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Misleading. That report discusses "medical errors", not
| "medical malpractice". They are not the same thing.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Po _ta_ to, pota _to_. Getting killed by a doctor fucking
| up is the third leading cause of death in America and
| doctors VERY RARELY ever face consequences for this.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Doctors -- and the wider medical systems they're part of
| -- are certainly not perfect. I think there are issues
| with the American health system (if it's even meaningful
| to refer to "a system" there) that are crying out for
| reform and improvement.
|
| But your sort of inflammatory comments are neither
| accurate nor helpful. That's just mud-slinging to try and
| score cheap points.
|
| [Edited to add:] To quote from your own link above:
|
| > The researchers caution that most of medical errors
| aren't due to inherently bad doctors, and that reporting
| these errors shouldn't be addressed by punishment or
| legal action. Rather, they say, most errors represent
| systemic problems, including poorly coordinated care,
| fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of
| safety nets, and other protocols, in addition to
| unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns that
| lack accountability.
|
| IMO, "killed by a doctor fucking up" is not a fair
| summary of that.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Yup that's another area I think AI could help. I'm not saying
| you know best. But if a AI gives you like 5 possibilities and
| maybe suggests 2 or 3 that in my mind could be better than a
| doctor doing the same.
|
| Not because a doctor is wrong, but it's nearly impossible for
| a general doctor (not a highly specialized one) to know every
| possibility, but an AI can look at so many factors, living
| area, other diagnosis related to similar environments, every
| similar looking scan from the entire dataset, etc. and maybe
| with the help of a doctor you can pinpoint a solution.
|
| I think there is a good avenue for a strong supporting role
| for AI. And teaching people to use it as a support mechanism.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| AI might one day take over the legal profession, but it won't be
| language-learning models that do it.
|
| An AI that can replace lawyers would have to be able to make
| knowledge-based inferences, based on actually conceptually
| understanding what it is reading, and saying. They have to be
| able to identify the _specific_ facts and circumstances that
| govern the matter at hand, not the _general_ conditions that
| would normally apply, since cases are won on the specifics.
|
| We're at least 2 decades away from that kind of AI, because AI
| research today is currently stuck in a local maxima of
| statistics-based brute force machine learning that doesn't
| actually lead to models that have any sort of intelligence about
| what they learn.
| concordDance wrote:
| The fact that a guild controls the legal system has always been
| alarming to me. Its very much in their interests to make it
| impossible to avoid spending huge amount on their services and
| reduce supply by making it hard for more people to become
| members.
|
| Lawyers will probably be the last profession to be automated.
| dools wrote:
| This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a
| parking ticket in the first place.
|
| The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary
| evidence that I should not have been liable.
|
| After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me
| a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay
| up now to avoid the risk.
|
| I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There were a
| bunch of cases heard before mine, 3 of which were parking
| violations.
|
| In all 3 cases the defendants received a default judgement
| because the council didn't even bother to send someone to fight
| the case.
|
| My case got the same result.
|
| Maybe I would hire a lawyer to sue the council for intimidation
| over the letter they sent, but I sure as hell wouldn't use an AI
| lawyer for that!
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| The reason you would need a lawyer for a parking ticket is:
|
| 1) It's not worth your time to be there yourself. (This assumes
| it cannot be done by mail as in your case.)
|
| 2) To know all the local procedures, judges, etc. and know what
| to expect.
|
| AI is not going to take care of either of those problems.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| 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 actually solved
| the real problem with the $28 million in investment money they
| took. The particular AI tech will have very little bearing on
| the company's eventual success or failure.
|
| The real problem isn't the complexity of the arguments in most
| cases (as your story shows). The real problem is the complexity
| of the regulatory system. Tesla has to deal with the dealership
| rules in several states. Fintech companies that handle real
| money have to deal with financial regulations or else they are
| smuggling money. Biotech startups have to follow the FDA rules
| or they are just drug dealers. Legal advice companies will have
| to deal with the rules too- and their opponents are
| particularly challenging.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Does the US have McKenzie Friends ? Seems like "No". You
| should get McKenzie Friends.
|
| McKenzie Friends can't represent you in court, in most cases
| they're not allowed to address the court, but they can help
| you in all the other ways you'd expect, like quietly
| prompting you on what points to mention, keeping notes,
| ensuring you have the right paperwork. Friend stuff.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_friend
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| The US does not have them, and they are not legal. I agree
| that they could be useful. But in the US you have strictly
| two options- represent yourself to a court, or let a bar-
| certified lawyer represent you. Nobody else gets to help in
| court. Outside of court, legal assistants help lawyers with
| administrative stuff- doing legal research, organizing
| paperwork, etc. But the lawyer holds the sole
| responsibility to the court.
|
| Unless DoNotPay has a strategy to change the law, they are
| in trouble. It seems that this case was a publicity stunt
| and not part of a larger strategy.
| asvitkine wrote:
| Seems like the company could perhaps switch its focus to
| markets where these are allowed?
| idkyall wrote:
| It's sort of a catch-22, Law in the US is only a
| lucrative market to disrupt because the regulation and
| gatekeeping has made labor expensive. If lawyers didn't
| bill 300+/hr in the US, then an AI powered startup to
| replace them wouldn't be cost effective. There's a joke I
| saw recently about a guy hiring a lawyer for a $800
| traffic violation and getting a bill for $1200.
|
| I can't speak to the price of a lawyer abroad, but a
| quick google seems to indicate US lawyer salaries on avg
| are up to ~2x as much as in some parts of Europe[1][2].
|
| [1]https://www.legalcheek.com/2020/12/revealed-the-eu-
| countries...
|
| [2]https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-
| jobs/lawyer/salary
| bloak wrote:
| > 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 example of advice that may or may not be
| "legal advice" think about how to fill in a tax return, how
| to apply for a government grant, how to apply for or
| challenge planning permission, how to deal with a difficult
| employer/employee/neighbour/tenant/landlord, how to apply for
| a patent, how to deal with various kinds of government
| inspector, ... That's all specialist stuff for which you
| might want professional advice but not necessarily from a
| "lawyer" (depending on what that word means in your part of
| the world).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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
| Nowado wrote:
| Following the analogy, aren't there supplements and
| collectibles for law?
| shubb wrote:
| If GPT can pass an MBA paper, can a carefully trained chatbot
| mixed with hand coded logic pass a bar exam?
| ss108 wrote:
| IIRC, a thread was posted on here indicating ChatGPT
| already had
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Only four states allow people to take the bar exam without
| earning a juris doctorate (J.D.) from law school. And three
| other states require some law school experience but do not
| require graduating with a J.D.
|
| So in 43 states the answer is no. A chatbot never attended
| law school and doesn't have a J.D., so it can't take the
| exam. If it can't take the exam, it can't pass.
|
| I suppose if you could get the chatbot permission to take
| the exam, a properly trained one could pass. But as I said
| in my post up a level, the issue isn't the AI chatbot. It's
| the rules.
|
| https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-
| development/can-...
| shubb wrote:
| Doesn't this just open the question of whether the
| chatbot can get a JD?
|
| The other angle is whether the chatbot can be equivalent
| to a process which a proper person can rubber stamp. For
| instance, a professional engineer might run a pre-written
| structural engineering model against their building
| design and certify that the building was sound - and then
| stand up in court and say they had followed standard
| process.
|
| It seems weirdest here that the court is treating the
| chatbot as a person. Lawyers use computer tools all the
| time for discovery, and then use that information to make
| arguments in court as a proper person.
|
| You can represent yourself in court without being a
| lawyer, so isn't a person doing so just a proper person
| rubber stamping a an electronic output?
|
| It feels like this court decision, that an electronic
| tool is not a proper person, is some kind of case law
| that chat bots are people. I don't think they are.
| freejazz wrote:
| The difference is the engineer is liable... how is an AI
| going to be liable. What is the point of holding an AI
| liable? If the company is going to be liable on behalf of
| the AI, what do you think is going to happen? They aren't
| going to provide the service...
| nindalf wrote:
| LLMs can already pass a medical exam.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13138
|
| So maybe?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| The very abstract of your linked paper refutes your
| claims.
|
| > The resulting model [...] performs encouragingly, but
| remains inferior to clinicians.
| naasking wrote:
| Being inferior to clinicians doesn't entail it didn't
| pass.
| nindalf wrote:
| Firstly, that's not my claim. I merely said it passed the
| USMLE. Which it did.
|
| Is it also inferior to clinicians? Yes, there's room to
| improve. But maybe next time read the whole paper before
| writing a comment.
|
| > Clinicians were asked to rate answers provided to
| questions in the HealthSearchQA, Live QA and Medication
| question answering datasets. Clinicians were asked to
| identify whether the answer is aligned with the
| prevailing medical/scientific consensus; whether the
| answer was in opposition to consensus; or whether there
| is no medical/scientific consensus for how to answer that
| particular question (or whether it was not possible to
| answer this question).
|
| And on this criteria, clinicians were rated as being
| aligned with consensus 92.9% of the time while the
| MedPalm model was aligned with consensus 92.6% of the
| time.
|
| Does the paper still refute my claims?
| ClarityJones wrote:
| > It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you
| are not licensed to practice law.
|
| You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you
| lines... even if that person is an attorney.
|
| However, a party / attorney certainly can bring in notes / a
| casebook / etc. You can usually bring in a laptop, with
| search functions, pdfs, etc. An AI that quickly presents
| relevant information, documents, caselaw, etc. would 100% be
| allowed. However, if they're sworn in to testify, these would
| usually be taken away, because testimony is supposed to be
| from personal knowledge / memory.
| elil17 wrote:
| > You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you
| lines... even if that person is an attorney.
|
| I believe this varies state by state. In Delaware,
| litigants representing themselves can bring a cell phone to
| court, and could presumably use it to have lines fed to
| them (e.g., I don't know that anyone has done that but I
| can't find any rule against it). In neighboring Maryland,
| you can't use electronic devices for communication with
| persons during in court (although the AI would not be a
| person so it would be allowed).
| pseingatl wrote:
| You can have a non-lawyer represent a company or an
| individual in an arbitration or mediation if the parties
| agree.
| jonstewart wrote:
| One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry
| constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for
| good reasons. Car dealerships are for sure a clear example of
| regulatory capture, but "legal advice from lawyers",
| "medicine from doctors", "insurance from companies that can
| prove they can pay out", and "equities backed by actual
| assets" all exist for good reasons.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Licenses for cutting hair or applying makeup?
| https://www.mprnews.org/amp/story/2019/11/13/freelance-
| weddi...
| pseingatl wrote:
| Milton Friedman covered this in _Capitalism and Freedom_.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Where do you draw the line?
|
| I'd say that an industry with significant health, safety
| or financial risk should require regulation and
| licensing. Your example seems a bit crazy.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The funny thing is that doctors would be the canonical
| examples for most people. Yet, there is no license that
| stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery. What
| stops the pediatrician from performing brain surgery is
| that no hospital would hire them as a brain surgeon, no
| insurance would insure their brain surgery and if
| something goes wrong they'd likely face a lawsuit they
| couldn't win. Why is the system able to judge the
| difference between a pediatrician and a brain surgeon but
| we need licensing to distinguish between doctor and non-
| doctor?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > there is no license that stops a pediatrician from
| performing brain surgery.
|
| This isn't the case everywhere. Where I am (New Zealand)
| each doctor has a scope of practice. You work within your
| scope. There may be conditions placed on a scope of
| practice too (eg supervision is required).
|
| You can look up every doctor's scope of practice and get
| a short summary of their training on the medical council
| website.
|
| Other health professions follow a similar model.
|
| https://www.mcnz.org.nz/registration/register-of-doctors/
| giantg2 wrote:
| The answer is in your question.
|
| It's the credentialing. The pediatrician lacks the
| credentials of a neurosurgeon. Just as non-doctors lack
| the credentials to work as a doctor. The hosptial,
| insurance, and court would all be looking at the
| credentials.
| 988747 wrote:
| Credentials are not the same as license. For example,
| software engineers do not need to pass any certification
| exams to practice software engineering, but companies
| still look at their education, years of experience,
| etc... Yes, it would make a recruitment process for
| doctors longer, as you would have to interview them, ask
| them questions to verify their medical knowledge, etc.,
| but it is not impossible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| And yet, in your software example those companies
| overwhelming rely on degrees to credentialize candidates
| regardless of actual skill.
|
| Licensing is merely a subset of the larger credentialing
| world. Even in your doctor example, the license is not
| the issue - board certification of a specialty would be
| the issue.
| freejazz wrote:
| You misunderstand licensing. Licensing ensures a minimum
| of conduct and creates a standard for liability for
| falling below that level of conduct.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I know that perfectly well. That doesn't change what I've
| said as it applies to the examples above.
| freejazz wrote:
| It does. Licensing has nothing to do with your
| credentials past having them. The state bar doesn't care
| which lawschool you went to, your LSAT score, your GPA,
| etc.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It does"
|
| How?
|
| "Licensing has nothing to do with your credentials past
| having them."
|
| The way that most credentialing is used for employment.
| freejazz wrote:
| That's separate from having your license. You don't need
| to be employed by a law firm to be a licensed atty
| giantg2 wrote:
| What's your point here? You still need a license.
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| This is kind of an absurd example. The system is setup in
| such a way that such a person would be in enormous
| amounts of trouble even face criminal liability. They may
| not face a law called "practicing medicine without a
| license" but they would face negligent or other similarly
| severe charges. As well, the fact that this never, ever
| happens seems to indicate the current regulatory
| structure is enough for this.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The US really doesn't have the concept of 'scope of
| practice'?
|
| That's what's being argued here and other systems have
| it. It seems an obvious thing.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's called malpractice. What you described is prima
| facie malpractice and a key element of malpractice is
| that it is a licensed profession with a standard of
| conduct.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| Cutting hair is one thing. But hairdressers also handle
| things like, for example, chemical relaxation of hair,
| which can be seriously dangerous in the wrong hands. I
| don't know where the answer lies for regulation. But it
| seems to be there for at least some reason.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Crazier case is places that braid hair and pose. In some
| states they are now required to get a license as a
| cosmetician (which takes longer on average than becoming
| a police officer in the US). The classes required for the
| license teach no skill relevant to the hair braiding.
| However, the hair braiding is in competition with the
| hair dressers who also control the licensing board.
|
| Longer discussion of the topic on Econtalk:
| https://www.econtalk.org/dick-carpenter-on-
| bottleneckers/#au...
| naasking wrote:
| > One could also argue the real problem is the tech
| industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in
| place for good reasons
|
| They _were_ good reasons. By definition, disruptive
| technologies change the situation. Sometimes for the
| better, sometimes not. You have to leave room for
| innovation or you stagnate.
| jonstewart wrote:
| Everyone's permitted to represent themselves pro se, and
| a pro se litigant could obviously use ChatGPT. What one
| can't do is offer ChatGPT as legal advice, and that still
| seems like a solid reason for regulation, given how
| terrible and inaccurate some ChatGPT output has been.
| lolinder wrote:
| ChatGPT is not disruptive enough to be used in law, end
| of story. It's a very impressive language model, but like
| any language model it will hallucinate, inventing
| arguments that sound impressive on a surface level but
| bear no legal authority whatsoever. That's simply not
| acceptable in a courtroom.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Literally every regulation has pros and cons and those
| change over time with the makeup of the reality we live in.
| Something that was useful when passed may be hampering us
| now.
|
| Plenty of regulations have been an obvious net negative for
| society when passed to anyone who crunched the numbers but
| have been passed anyway because of appeals to emotion,
| political optics and special interest lobbying.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > One could also argue the real problem is the tech
| industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in
| place for good reasons
|
| This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a
| shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said
| no.
|
| And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim
| (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal
| arguments into court, output from modern-day voice
| recognition fed into ChatGPT, isn't shoddy.
|
| > ...but "legal advice from lawyers", "medicine from
| doctors", "insurance from companies that can prove they can
| pay out", and "equities backed by actual assets" all exist
| for good reasons.
|
| Exactly. 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.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >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 laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the
| legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly
| impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll.
| It's more about hiring your own bully to keep other
| bullies from bullying you than any airy-fairy "justice".
| The "never talk to cops" video comes to mind, where the
| lawyer gives a few examples of how a perfectly law-
| abiding person can run afoul of the law without meaning
| to.
|
| I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer
| squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most
| modern countries have some version of socialized or
| single payer health care, so why not make it the same for
| legal services? After all, fair and equal justice under
| the law is definitely something most national
| constitutions guarantee in some way, but getting a hip
| replacement is not. Why should rich people get access to
| better legal service than regular people?
| eouwt wrote:
| >> 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.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| > 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| >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.
|
| umm, how are you going to disbar your AI attorney? I'm so
| tired of this narrative you are crafting. You put the
| cart before the horse, and then you pat yourself on the
| back for slapping the horse ass!
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> 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 laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the
| legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly
| impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll.
|
| And software has become insanely complicated and nearly
| impossible to navigate without paying the software
| engineer toll.
|
| Life is complicated, and so is the law. Maybe it's just
| harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you
| think? I'm not saying the system is perfect, but railing
| against lawyers and getting rid of legal licensing is not
| the way to get to a better one.
|
| > I've often said that if you really want to make a
| lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care.
| Most modern countries have some version of socialized or
| single payer health care, so why not make it the same for
| legal services?
|
| You might have said that, but I doubt it would actually
| many real lawyers squirm any more than it would the idea
| of socialized software engineering would make developers
| squirm. And in any case, something like that already
| exists: the public defender's office.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial
| justice" than you think
|
| I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit
| that the current legal system (at least in the US, I
| don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-
| engineered?
|
| The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making
| even a simple Windows application can be very
| complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows
| itself? Can your application be replicated with a
| combination of existing Unix tools? Depends on the
| application, of course, but there is certainly a lot of
| cruft floating around the Windows API space.
|
| And let's also not forget that (often) one of the main
| purposes of commercial software is to lock you in to that
| particular piece of software. Same same with the legal
| system and lawyers.
|
| The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of
| thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every
| law on the books if they thought the whole case was
| nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding
| jury nullification for this reason.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| That's not why we have a jury system.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit
| that the current legal system (at least in the US, I
| don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-
| engineered?
|
| I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to
| really understand what it does" vibes here.
|
| > The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort
| of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore
| every law on the books if they thought the whole case was
| nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding
| jury nullification for this reason.
|
| Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good. It can (and
| has) gotten us to "he's innocent because he murdered a
| black man and the jury doesn't like blacks."
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to
| really understand what it does" vibes here
|
| Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty
| difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something
| is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically
| mean "Anarchy Now!"
|
| My point was that I think I do understand what the system
| does, and what it does is (largely) provide lots of work
| for people in the legal system. You see this when buying
| a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to
| companies and people and it's not clear exactly what
| actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like
| you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the
| real estate laws make it necessary.
|
| In other industries we know this as regulatory capture.
| This is just regulatory capture of the regulatory system.
|
| >Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good.
|
| Nothing is an unalloyed good. To bolster your example, OJ
| got to walk as well. This is why there is an entire
| industry built up around just the jury selection process.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering
| to really understand what it does" vibes here
|
| > Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty
| difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something
| is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically
| mean "Anarchy Now!"
|
| No, I'm suggesting that complexity may often have good
| reason. Without specific reform proposals, what you're
| saying registers similarly to "coding in programming
| languages is hard, so simplify it by coding in natural
| language!"
|
| > You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a
| bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not
| clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide,
| but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is
| necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.
|
| Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make
| that service unnecessary. And honestly, I bet you could
| "NOT do it" -- if you could pay cash for the property.
| IIRC, a lot of that is actually required by whoever you
| get your mortgage from, because _they_ know the value of
| it.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Without specific reform proposals
|
| I think requiring me to write a policy paper in HN
| comments is a bit onerous. In any event, I can't much
| help if my mild criticism is interpreted on your part as
| something deeply nefarious.
|
| >Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make
| that service unnecessary.
|
| The fact that a service exists does not make that service
| necessary. Or do you always buy the protection plan from
| Office Depot when you purchase a stapler? Anyway, I agree
| that the mortgage companies find great value in all of
| their various fees.
| freejazz wrote:
| > I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit
| that the current legal system (at least in the US, I
| don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-
| engineered)
|
| Huge Elon Musk rewrite the code from scratch vibes coming
| from you
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the current legal system...is...over-engineered_
|
| There are simultaneously arguments in this thread that
| the American legal system is insufficiently arcane and
| code-like, for what it's worth.
| lukev wrote:
| We do have "socialized law care" for criminal cases in
| the USA. That's what a public defender is. If you cannot
| afford a lawyer one will be provided by the court. That
| is a constitutional right.
|
| Of course they are overworked, have insane case loads,
| and the best attorneys are disincentivized from becoming
| public defenders. The system definitely needs an
| overhaul.
|
| But the concept that justice should in theory be
| available even if you can't afford it is well
| established.
| patentatt wrote:
| As a lawyer, I agree. Much of the trope of 'the lawyers
| always win' has a lot of truth to it, believe it or not.
| And all of the incentives align in this direction, it
| keeps the legal profession fat and happy and beholden to
| monied interests while suppressing access to the non-
| wealthy. And the rich don't actually care that they're
| being constantly fleeced, because it's just a cost of
| doing business that is really pretty finite in comparison
| to profits that can be made. It's almost like it's a
| feature of 'the system' (combination of capitalism and
| common law) and not an unintended side effect.
| dahart wrote:
| > I've often said that if you really want to make a
| lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care.
| Most modern countries have some version of socialized or
| single payer health care, so why not make it the same for
| legal services?
|
| We do have socialized law in the US, in the form of
| public defenders.
|
| > Why should rich people get access to better legal
| service than regular people?
|
| Oh, is "better" what you're talking about, not just
| access? This is different than what the first half of
| your paragraph implied. The answer, of course, is money.
| And rich people in all the "modern countries" you're
| referring to always have access to "better" than what's
| provided by all social services. Always. Unfortunate, but
| true, that money makes life unequal.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Oh, is "better" what you're talking about, not just
| access?
|
| Public defenders are overworked and underpaid, and you
| know that. It's like having a RPN do your appendectomy.
| Fair and equal justice would have every lawyer be a
| public defender. It's not like if you go to the hospital
| you get to pick which doctor sews your finger back on
| after the bandsaw accident.
|
| I'm not saying it's a good idea, but once you bring it
| into the conversation it makes both lawyers and
| socialized medicine advocates get a little uncomfortable.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I think you are thinking the legal system simple and it
| is basically a jobs program for lawyers. I think that is
| a very simplistic and unrealistic notion of the legal
| system. I also don't think many lawyers are squirming
| about socialism or whatever.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| S'all Good, man! /s
| ovi256 wrote:
| > all exist for good reasons
|
| Sure, but what's banned is surely not all medical or legal
| advice.
|
| I can browse case law or US code thinking about my case -
| somehow this does not need a legal license. At the other
| end of the continuum, talking to a lawyer about my case
| obviously needs him to be licensed.
|
| So now we're debating on which side of the cutoff using
| DoNotPay's robot must fall. The lawyers have made their
| mind ages ago that legal advice can only be dispensed by
| licensed humans.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I can browse case law or US code thinking about my
| case - somehow this does not need a legal license._
|
| Of course. With rare exceptions, court proceedings are
| public.
|
| But being able to read court proceeds or judgements or
| anything at all doesn't mean that you know and understand
| _the law_. You know, the actual words that are written
| and codified that must be interpreted and adhered to with
| _jurisprudence_.
|
| Not that lawyers actually do either. But at least they've
| been certified (by "the bar" association) to have some
| competence in the matter.
| asvitkine wrote:
| But on the other hand, one can't argue ignorance of the
| law so then everyone is supposed to already know all laws
| and understand them!
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I am strong believe that basics of law should be taught
| in school, especially criminal.
|
| If governmet will prosecute me for free (to the accuser),
| then it should, for free, teach me the law.
| dogleash wrote:
| >talking to a lawyer about my case obviously needs him to
| be licensed
|
| Why's that obvious tho? Shouldn't it be on you to decide
| if you want a licensed lawyer? Isn't that the point of
| your post?
| freejazz wrote:
| Do you not understand the concept of advice? Browsing the
| law and coming to your own conclusion isn't "getting
| advice".
| elil17 wrote:
| I don't think and anyone is saying that using the bot is
| illegal. The issue is that DoNotPay is calling the bot a
| lawyer and therefor implying that it gives legal advice.
| Their website literally says "World's First Robot
| Lawyer." Someone who doesn't understand AI might wrongly
| think that their AI tools are qualified to represent them
| on their own.
|
| I suspect that it would be much less of an issue if it
| was advertised as an "AI paralegal."
| markus_zhang wrote:
| IMHO some regulation and especially entry barriers had good
| ideas but their con overwhelm the pro nowadays (think
| barriers such as foreign doctors need to re-study X years and
| re-practice Y years, or you simply cannot take certification
| exams if you do not come from Z school, or technically you
| may lose insurance claims on your house if you do some
| repairs but do not have certification K).
|
| Since the world is already running like that, IT people
| should join the fun, otherwise we simply get screwed by other
| interest groups who are protected by those barriers. Since
| every one of those barriers simply increase the cost of whole
| society for the benefit of whoever behind them, we should
| setup our own barriers. If you do not graduate from a CS/SE
| degree you cannot take certification exams, and if you don't
| then you cannot do programming legally. We should increase
| further the cost of whole society to make everyone else
| realize the absurdity of those barriers.
| Loughla wrote:
| I don't understand your statement. Because regulations have
| advanced various fields, like medicine, engineering,
| health, environment, to the point that we are seeing the
| fruit of that regulation, we need to get rid of the
| regulations? We don't have to worry about really
| unqualified lawyers, doctors, teachers, or engineers, etc.
| So what we need to do is go back to a time when we did?
|
| Also, aren't there already numerous certifications you earn
| for various technologies that companies explicitly look for
| when hiring?
|
| I'm confused about what you're getting at.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just my cynical vents about some entry barriers.
| freejazz wrote:
| >"The real problem isn't the complexity of the arguments in
| most cases (as your story shows)."
|
| Uhh, do you think most attorneys work cases that are in
| traffic court? That's not the case.
| Digory wrote:
| Government doesn't have time to deal with moderately informed
| opponents on individual tickets, so they don't show up.
|
| DNP should take the other side of this bet. AI for prosecution.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| > This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a
| parking ticket in the first place.
|
| There are plenty of jurisdictions that have all sorts of
| onerous rules that tilt things in favor of the prosecution
| because they use traffic and parking enforcement as a revenue
| generator. These rules are cheered on by <looks around room and
| gestures> because politicians and high level bureaucrats aren't
| idiots and know how to frame things to sell them to any given
| audience.
| nzealand wrote:
| This was actually arguments for a speeding ticket in
| California.
|
| For those in the bay area with parking tickets.... I've had
| hundreds of parking tickets in California. I would _always_
| lose the first round of dispute, because it is adjudicated by
| the city /county that gets the revenue. The second level of
| dispute is reviewed by an independent party who actually looks
| at what you state and makes an impartial decision, and the
| third level is reviewed by the courts. I disputed hundreds of
| tickets, and only once did I _almost_ get to the third level.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Are you a lawyer who deals with traffic law, or is California
| just some sort of dystopia where you get hundreds of parking
| tickets as a normal way of life?
|
| Up here in Ontario I've had 1 ticket in my life. I just...
| no, there is no way you're getting hundreds as an individual.
| nzealand wrote:
| I had the custom plates NV and ended up in some sort of
| dystopia where I got hundreds of parking tickets for all
| different makes and models of cars until well after I
| returned the plates.
|
| I wrote my story up here...
|
| https://100parkingtickets.com/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Good gravy. Thanks for the link. What a read.
| izacus wrote:
| > This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a
| parking ticket in the first place.
|
| If this is dumb, then remove the regulation / requirement for
| the lawyer. Don't "fix" this by generating and injecting
| bullshit into the system and requiring that judges and everyone
| else now sift through the generated dross.
| fudged71 wrote:
| That's the point... it's an MVP, they went for an easy basic
| case like Parking Tickets.
| Pinegulf wrote:
| True, but I don't thinks it's about if you need one or not. I
| think it's about money. Luddites trying to keep automation out
| from their profession.
| throwawa454 wrote:
| I'm facing 20 years in jail. I would MUCH RATHER have an
| actual world class lawyer representing me than a freaking
| chatbot!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Then you should go get one.
|
| Personally, I really like Envy Apples but I don't ban the
| other varieties, do I?
| wittycardio wrote:
| [dead]
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I'm betting they gas up the numbers by only considering cases
| that they send people to fight, and ignore these default
| judgement cases... that's takin' the piss, amIrite?
| pibechorro wrote:
| I was snatched up in an entrapment scheme by the Bronx police a
| decade or so ago. They waited for a bad rainy day, knowing the
| subway flooded badly, then put police tape around the
| turnstyles and opened the emergency gates wide open. As the
| hundreds of people followed each other down the tunnel the
| insticnt of everyone was to follow everyone else walking past,
| assuming the flooding broke the turnstyles. Fast forward 10min
| when the train shows up. The cops stopped the train, closed the
| exits and rounded up everyone issuing them 100$ tickets.
|
| I fought it. The courtroom had people, mainly minorities, in a
| line all around the block in winter time. It was a money
| generating racket, preying on the poorest citizens who could
| not afford a $100 ticket, to loose a day of work,let alone a
| lawyer.
|
| I was the only one there with a letter written by my lawyer.
| When it was my turn and they saw I had a lawyer ready to fight
| they dismissed my case with no explanation. Shameless.
|
| Everyone takes a plea deal and they just extract millions from
| us. The courts, lawyers, the police.
|
| Do not take plea deals! Fight them. Grind the courts, force
| them to work for it. Hold them accountable. I cant WAIT for ai
| to make them obsolete.
| ok123456 wrote:
| An AI based lawyer but it's been trained on Darrell Brooks.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Shakespeare was right.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| It's someone's gimmicky app idea that blew up into something
| way bigger than it was.
| rideontime wrote:
| 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
| eaurouge wrote:
| No, the service doesn't work. It's just marketing and PR.
| stevespang wrote:
| [dead]
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers,
| doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and
| consultants are going to face some competition from tools like
| this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on
| expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even a
| first opinion.
|
| Whether that's misguided or not is not the question. The only
| question is how good/valuable the AI advice is going to be.
| Initially, you might expect lots of issues with this. Or at least
| areas where it under performs or is not optimal. But it's already
| showing plenty of potential and it's only going to improve from
| here.
|
| It's natural for experts to feel threatened by this but not a
| very productive attitude long term. It would be prudent for them
| to embrace this, or at least acknowledge this, and integrate it
| in their work process so they can earn their money in the areas
| where these tools still fall short by focusing less on the boring
| task of doing very routine cases and more on the less routine
| cases.
|
| Same with doctors. Whether they like it or not, patients are
| going to show up having used these tools and having a diagnosis
| ready. Or second guessing the diagnosis they get from their
| doctor. When the AI diagnosis is clearly wrong, that's a problem
| of course (and a liability issue potentially). But there are
| going to be a lot of cases where AI is going to suggest some sane
| things or even better things. And of course no doctor is perfect.
| I know of a lot of cases where people shop around to get second
| opinions. Reason: some doctors get it wrong or are not
| necessarily up to speed with the latest research. And of course
| some people can't really afford medical help. That's sad but a
| real issue.
|
| Instead of banning these tools, I expect a few years from now,
| doctors, lawyers, etc. will use tools like this to speed up their
| work, dig through lots of information they never read, and do
| their work more efficiently. I expect some hospitals and insurers
| will start insisting on these tools being used pretty soon
| actually. There's a cost argument that less time should be wasted
| on routine stuff and there's a quality argument as well. AIs
| should be referring patients to doctors as needed but handle
| routine cases without human intervention or at least prepare most
| of the work for final approval.
|
| Same with lawyers. They could write a lot of legalese manually.
| Or they could just do a quick check on the generated letters and
| documents. They bill per hour of course but they'll be competing
| with lawyers billing less hours for the same result.
| dogleash wrote:
| >There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers,
| doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and
| consultants are going to face some competition from tools like
| this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on
| expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even
| a first opinion.
|
| What are you on about? This has been ongoing for decades.
|
| You're talking down to hypothetical doctors as if doctors don't
| already deal with the phenomenon of people self-diagnosing from
| the internet. We as humanity already know the benefits and
| drawbacks of Dr. Google.
|
| The only thing AI does that search engines don't, is it takes
| the pile of links a search engine would find and synthesizes it
| into a tailored piece of text designed to sound topical and
| authoritative. And delivers it to people who already believe
| too much of the shit they read on the internet.
| rafaelero wrote:
| Google's AI can actually pass the medical bar test and offer
| diagnosis almost as accurate as clinicians'. That seems very,
| very different from a search engine.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| 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 sanctionable, or even
| disbarrable, offense *.
|
| Thus, effectively, the only thing you could do is a watered down
| concept of the idea: A lawyer that will parrot the ChatGPT
| answer, but only if said answer is something they would plausibly
| argue themselves. They'd have to rewrite or disregard anything
| ChatGPT told them to say that they don't think is solid argument.
|
| They also run a segment where a non-lawyer takes a bar exam.
| Recently they've also asked the bar exam question to ChatGPT as
| well. So far _ChatGPT got it wrong every time_. For example, it
| doesn 't take into account that multiple answers can be correct,
| in which case you have to pick the most specific answer
| available. Leading to a somewhat hilarious scenario where ChatGPT
| picks an answer and then defends its choice in a way that seems
| to indicate why the answer it picked is obviously the wrong
| answer.
|
| *) Of course, Alan Dershowitz is now arguing in court that the
| seditious horse manure he signed his name under and which is now
| leading to him being sanctioned or possibly disbarred, is not
| appropriate because he's old and didn't know what he was doing.
| It's Dershowitz so who knows, but I'm guessing the court is not
| going to take his argument seriously. In the odd chance that they
| do, I guess you can just say whatever you want and not be
| responsible for it, which... would be weird.
| wpietri wrote:
| > So far __ChatGPT got it wrong every time__.
|
| The first wave of ChatGPT stories were all "amazing, wonderful,
| humanity is basically obsolete". But now that people have had a
| little time, I'm seeing a ton of examples where people are
| realizing that ChatGPT _sounds_ like it knows what it 's
| talking about, but actually doesn't _know_ anything.
|
| We know that humans are easily fooled by glib confidence; we
| can all think of politicians who have succeeded that way. But
| it sounds like ChatGPT's real innovation is something that
| produces synthetic bullshit. And here I'm using Frankfurt's
| definition, "speech intended to persuade without regard for
| truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
| TillE wrote:
| ChatGPT does some really impressive stuff! As a creative tool
| or a code generator it can give you some good material to
| work with.
|
| But the hype has been insane, totally untethered from
| reality. I think it's the instinct to assume that something
| which can mimic human speech quite well must also have some
| mechanism for comprehending the meaning of the words it's
| generating, when it really doesn't.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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_.
| legitster wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Got it. There are not enough affordable legal services in the US,
| and so the Bar's solution is to regulate them away.
| rideontime wrote:
| The solution certainly isn't to allow charlatans to exploit
| those of lesser means.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can
| intervene when necessary.
|
| If ChatGPT did something wrong, that lawyer would still be on the
| hook for deciding to continue using this tool so
| responsibility/liability/authenticity is not a problem.
|
| I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to
| replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion,
| as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers) but
| just like Tesla needs someone in the drivers seat to overrule the
| occasional phantom breaking and swerving, you need an actual
| lawyer for your proof of concept cases if you're going to go AI
| in a new area.
|
| You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT of
| course, because you can't just record lawsuits, but anyone with a
| steno keyboard should be able to keep up with a court room.
| epups wrote:
| > a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich
| would then have access to actual lawyers
|
| The rich don't go to jail already. The crypto scammer paid a
| huge bail and got out on his private jet. That, to me, is far
| more dystopian than a cheap tool to help people appeal traffic
| tickets.
| watwut wrote:
| It is actually OK and correct for justice system to NOT keep
| people in jail prior sentencing unless necessary.
|
| It is dishonest to conflate "not being sentenced yet" with
| "got out".
| epups wrote:
| If that's the case, why involve money in it? About a third
| of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you
| are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it. Of course
| bail is a mechanism for differential treatment between rich
| and poor in the judicial system.
| [deleted]
| watwut wrote:
| I am not defending bail as a system. However, the system
| in USA relies on it. The complaint here was not that poor
| people stay in jail. The complain was purely about
| someone being able to pay bail.
|
| > About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford
| bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you
| can pay it.
|
| This means 2/3 of arrested people can afford bail or are
| released without it. A case of single rich person having
| affordable bail is not exactly proof of inequality here.
| Poor people who had low enough bail they were able to pay
| do exist too.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right, the UK generally doesn't have cash bail, and the
| most recent noteworthy example where cash bail _was_ used
| (Julian Assange) the accused did not in fact surrender
| and those who stumped up the money for bail lost their
| money, suggesting it 's just a way for people with means
| to avoid justice.
|
| The overwhelming majority of cases bailed in the UK
| surrender exactly as expected, even in cases where they
| know they are likely to receive a custodial sentence.
| Where people don't surrender I've _been_ to hearings for
| those people and they 're almost invariably _incompetent_
| rather than seriously trying to evade the law. Like, you
| were set bail for Tuesday afternoon, you don 't show up,
| Wednesday morning the cops get your name, they go to your
| mum's house, you're asleep in bed because you thought it
| was _next_ Tuesday. Idiots, but hardly a great danger to
| society. The penalty for not turning up is they spend
| however long in the cells until the court gets around to
| them, so still better than the US system but decidedly
| less convenient than if they 'd actually turned up as
| requested.
| pocketarc wrote:
| You're conflating a few different things. Being able to pay
| bail so you don't have to be in jail while you wait for your
| trial doesn't get you out of having a trial, and has nothing
| to do with needing lawyers.
|
| What the parent was referring to is the fact that if AI
| starts to consume the low-end (starting with traffic
| tickets), actual lawyers for trials will become even more
| expensive, and thus poorer people will actually fare worse
| because they will lose their already-limited access to human
| lawyers. Yes, their case might get handled with less hassle
| and cheaper, but the quality of the service is not -better-,
| it's just cheaper/easier.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > the fact that if AI starts to consume the low-end
| (starting with traffic tickets), actual lawyers for trials
| will become even more expensive
|
| That should only happen if lawyers become very niche or if
| those low end cases are subsidizing trials.
|
| I doubt the former, and the latter means the situation is
| already bad and mainly just the type of unfairness would
| change.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Supply vs demand, won't there just be more supply
| availble for other cases ?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Or maybe we only end up using lawyers when they're actually
| needed, and they become less costly for things like
| criminal trials. Think on the doctor whose routine cold and
| flu visits are replaced by an AI. Now they have a lot more
| time and bandwidth to handle patients who actually need
| physician care.
|
| We can't just assume it's going to go the worst way.
| Neither outcome is particularly more likely, and the human
| element is by far the most unpredictable.
|
| To wit: I was listening to a report yesterday on NPR about
| concierge primary care physicians. The MD they were
| interviewing was declining going that direction because
| they saw being a doctor as part duty and felt concierge
| medicine went against that.
| dandellion wrote:
| It seems to me you're the only one conflating things?
| Grandparent didn't say anything about getting out of having
| a trial, or about needing lawyers. They're talking about
| how people with money can use it to avoid spending time in
| jail, and gave a perfectly valid example of someone rich
| doing exactly that.
| watwut wrote:
| That is pretty bad example. In theory, bail should be
| affordable to the individual person. It is meant to be
| insurance that you come back for actual court date.
|
| The outrage there is bails being set to unaffordable
| sizes for poor people. OP was picking out the case where
| bail functioned as intended.
| harimau777 wrote:
| That seems like a distinction without a difference. It
| still means that the rich aren't in jail in situations
| where the poor are.
| watwut wrote:
| The complaint however was not about inequality. The
| comment which started thread made no concern about
| inequality or poor.
|
| The complaint was purely about rich people avoiding jail
| prior sentencing due to being able to pay bail. This was
| called dystopian.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >The crypto scammer paid a huge bail and got out on his
| private jet.
|
| Locally, it's a somewhat significant problem that people are
| getting caught for violent crimes and getting released
| immediately and reoffending.
| ketzu wrote:
| How significant is that problem? As far as I am aware
|
| * Not allowing bail for people at high risk of reoffending
| or flight is already allowed
|
| * Reoffending while waiting on trial or out on bail is rare
|
| On the other hand there seems to be a huge problem in the
| US of people being detained for long times without a trial.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I could run the actual statistics for my district's Court
| and tell you the percentage of reoffending while on bond,
| but in my experience a number approaching 40%, of people
| out on felony bonds, are re-arrested for additional
| felony conduct.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Why is it a problem?
|
| Do they get bail a second time?
|
| Do you think they wouldn't reoffend if they weren't
| released until after they are punished?
|
| If they do two crimes and get two sentences, does it matter
| if that's AABB or ABAB?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Well, because there are now e.g. two cases of murder
| instead of only one, and the second one was entirely
| preventable? Oh, right, the law is not about the
| populace's lives and well-being, how silly of me to
| assume that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You didn't answer my questions. Do you think it would
| decrease the odds of reoffending if they didn't get bail?
|
| If it doesn't, then it's two crimes either way, just
| timed differently. And after the policy settled in it
| would have negligible impact on the crime rate.
|
| Also if you're doing sentencing for two crimes at once
| you can give a longer punishment for the first crime and
| get them off the street longer.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Yes, it would decrease the odds, provided that after
| walking out of jail the probability of a criminal to
| commit a crime (that includes his intent to reoffend but
| also possible changes in the environment that happened
| during his time in jail that reduce his possibilities to
| do so) is less than before walking in, because they
| wouldn't get the chance to reoffend _immediately_.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't assume that someone coming out of a sentence is
| less likely to commit a crime. Isn't it often the
| opposite, because the US is so bad at rehabilitation?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime
| sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you?
|
| But no, the probability does decreases since not every
| ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender; also, some people
| die during the sentence... the probability _does_ go
| down, for many small reasons compounded together.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime
| sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you?
|
| Not unless I'm a robot programmed to prevent recidivism
| at all costs. Why are you even asking this?
|
| > But no, the probability does decreases since not every
| ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender
|
| ...and not everyone released before their trial becomes a
| repeat offender.
|
| > some people die during the sentence
|
| Is that a significant effect? I don't think most
| sentences are long enough for that to make a big
| difference, and I don't think preventing a _single_ crime
| per _lifetime_ , at _most_ , is enough reason to keep
| people locked up for the lengthy pre-trial process.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I assume that the original comment was about how someone
| can get could pretty much red-handed for battery and
| assault/home violence but then instead of getting put
| into pre-trial/provisional detention (yes, you can get
| locked up even before being judged guilty, outrageous),
| they are just allowed to go because eh, why bother.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| When you say "just allowed to go", you mean until the
| trial, right?
|
| Because otherwise we're talking about completely
| different scenarios.
|
| But if there is still a trial I don't see how "why
| bother" makes sense...
| bombolo wrote:
| It's also a problem to put people in jail without a trial.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Every time I see this "traffic ticket" thing, it usually
| looks like
|
| 1) The driver was actually speeding
|
| and
|
| 2) The driver is trying to get off on a technicality
|
| Is that the case?
|
| In the US do you get "points" on your driving license so that
| if you are caught speeding several times in the space of a
| couple of years you get banned?
|
| In the UK being caught mildly speeding (say doing 60 in a
| 50), in the course of 3 years it's typically
|
| 1st time: 3 hour course and PS100
|
| 2nd, 3rd, 4th time: 3 points and PS100
|
| 5th time: Driving ban and PS100 (or more)
| lmm wrote:
| True as far as it goes, but bear in mind that a huge
| proportion of the population speeds routinely. So enforcing
| the law doesn't feel equitable; the rule of law already
| doesn't exist on the roads.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| For traffic tickets, it is often possible to go to court
| and have the judge offer a reduced fine for pleading guilty
| or no contest (you don't admit guilt, but you don't plead
| innocence and accept the punishment).
|
| Most people, when they want to fight such tickets, think
| they can argue their way out of it. Whereas the judge and
| officers simply just want to get the hearings over with.
| They do hundreds of such hearings a week and have heard it
| all before. So, the judge will tell the courtroom that they
| can get a reduction and how to get it. Sadly, the
| defendants are anxious, have been mentally preparing
| themselves for a fight, and are in an unfamiliar
| environment so they tend to get tunnel vision and choose to
| plead 'not guilty'. They inevitably loose.
|
| If you ever find yourself in such a situation, pay close
| attention to what the judge offers everyone before the
| hearings begin. If they don't offer such a bargain, when it
| is your time to appear before the judge you can ask "would
| the court consider a reduction in exchange for a plea of no
| contest?" It doesn't hurt to ask.
| brookst wrote:
| The US is similar, but we also have other dynamics. Some
| municipalities rely on traffic tickets for revenue, so they
| have a perverse incentive to create more infractions.
| Notable examples are automated ticketing at red light
| leading to shorter yellows[0], and speed traps where a
| small town on a highway sets unreasonably low speed
| limits[1].
|
| 0. https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-
| to-y...
|
| 1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-
| come-e...
| wardedVibe wrote:
| The difference is that in large swaths of the US, taking
| away their license is not that different from house arrest.
|
| Breaking the speed limit by 10mph is completely unenforced.
| I've yet to be on the highway without someone going 20
| over, and no enforcement.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Same in the UK, you have to get lifts or taxis
| everywhere, unless you live in big cities (London has
| great public transport, but so does New York. The weekly
| bus that my sister gets doesn't really help her to travel
| to work as dozens of different schools all over the
| county)
|
| It's a very good reason not to speed.
|
| So it's just a fine that Americans get for speeding?
|
| Are fines at least proportional to wealth? Or can a rich
| people speed without problem as saving 10 minutes on
| their journey is worth the $100 fine even if it was
| guaranteed they got one?
|
| (In the UK speed is almost entirely enforced by cameras,
| not by police cars which are rarely seen on roads.
| Removes any bias the cop might have -- maybe the cop has
| it in for young tesla drivers so pulls them over, but
| lets the old guy in a pickup go past)
| alistairSH wrote:
| No, fines are not proportional to wealth (at least in
| most states). They're either flat fees or pegged to
| speed. Points on license as well, so ~3 tickets inside a
| year and you lose your license or have to take a course
| to keep it.
|
| Most tickets are given by live officers. Cameras do
| exist, but typically only in dense urban areas. Which
| opens another can of worms, as police are biased.
|
| We also have lists of secondary offenses the officer can
| cite only after citing you for speeding (or some other
| primary offense). Things like a failed light bulb, or
| some other minor safety issue. These are
| disproportionately used against PoC.
| xienze wrote:
| > So it's just a fine that Americans get for speeding?
|
| Well, things vary from state to state. But there is
| definitely a point system in place for excessive
| speeding, speeding in a school zone, passing a school bus
| at any speed, stuff like that. In a lot of places you can
| be arrested for reckless driving, with varying levels of
| what defines "reckless." Virginia is notorious for their
| speeding laws. Speeding in excess of 20mph of the posted
| limit or in excess of 80mph regardless of limit (e.g. 81
| in a 65) is what they consider reckless driving and it's
| a misdemeanor that could potentially (but not likely)
| give you a one year jail sentence.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| In the US you get a fine and you get points against you.
| Points cause your auto insurance to go up. And too many
| results in restricted or a suspended license. Which
| doesn't prevent people from driving but usually causes
| them to drive very conservatively so as not to get
| caught.
|
| And the parent is correct the much of the US is set up
| for people to drive so much so that being draconian isn't
| practical. And it's something to keep in mind that any
| given individual didn't decide that's how the place they
| live in is setup.
| epistemer wrote:
| In the US, a small percentage of people drive completely
| insane. If going 75mph on a highway that is 65mph or
| 70mph someone will fly past going a 100mph.
|
| Those are the people that get tickets. Otherwise, it is
| pretty difficult to even get pulled over.
|
| I have only been pulled over twice in my life and not in
| 20 years. I think police departments have cut back quite
| a bit on police trying to rack up traffic tickets.
|
| The fine is not the issue. The whole process is a massive
| waste of your time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If they just wanted to show the world their product was
| viable, why didn't they pay for a real lawyer who's down to
| their luck to read out the crap ChatGPT was spewing out so
| there wouldn't be any legal gray area?
|
| They tried that, but swung for the fences for publicity: they
| had a $1,000,000 offer to any attorney with a case pending
| before the Supreme Court to use it for oral argument.
|
| Up until they abandoned the whole robot lawyer idea, that offer
| was open but apparently got no takers.
|
| > You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT
| of course, because you can't just record lawsuits,
|
| You also generally can't use an earpiece to get a feed in the
| courtroom, either.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| No, they didn't try "that". "That" is having a lawyer in some
| basic case do it. The supreme court idea was never going
| happen and they knew it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > No, they didn't try "that".
|
| In the the construction "they tried that, but... ", the
| part after "but", if it identifies an action by the actor
| and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is
| described by "that". So, I'm not sure what you are arguing
| against here.
|
| > The supreme court idea was never going happen and they
| knew it.
|
| I don't think they knew it, just as I don't think the bknew
| the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or
| the problems with their whole suite of legal ("sue in small
| claims court", child custody, divorce) assistance
| supposedly-AI products were problenatic. I think they jist
| took the path of boldly striding into a domain they didn't
| understand but somehow thought that they could market "AI"
| for, and ran into unpleasant reality on multiple fronts,
| forcing not only their scheduled traffic court demo and
| their hoped-for Supreme Court demo to fail to materialize,
| but also several of their already-available legal-aid
| products to be pulled, so that they would focus exclusively
| on consumer assistance products without as much legal
| sensitivity.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > In the the construction "they tried that, but... ", the
| part after "but", if it identifies an action by the actor
| and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is
| described by "that". So, I'm not sure what you are
| arguing against here.
|
| I'm saying the departure is so big that it doesn't make
| sense to frame it as even a partial solution to the idea.
|
| > I don't think they knew it, just as I don't think the
| bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to
| happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal
| ("sue in small claims court", child custody, divorce)
| assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic.
|
| The combination of supreme court cases being so narrow,
| the interrogation being so harsh, the tech allowed in
| being carefully restricted, and the stakes being so high
| makes me think they would understand the gap between that
| demo and "find a guy with a parking ticket who happens to
| be a lawyer".
| LegitShady wrote:
| You can't use electronic devices at the supreme court and the
| consequences for the lawyer for doing so (plus the effects of
| being questioned by supreme court judges on small details of
| case law) would probably be pretty dire
| golemotron wrote:
| > I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can
| intervene when necessary.
|
| There's a big problem. Not all wrongness can be identified in
| the moment. AI can produce convincing wrongness unintentionally
| and easily.
| nicbou wrote:
| If something wrong happens and the lawyer is officially
| responsible, the onus is still on you to make your claim,
| likely in court.
|
| I'm dealing with a similar issue where an expert is indeed
| wrong and indeed responsible for his mistake, but the wronged
| party needs to spend a lot of money proving that they got wrong
| advice in front of the courts. The wronged party does not speak
| the local language (as is common in Europe), so that's unlikely
| to happen.
|
| There's a huge gap between being technically right, and seeing
| justice.
| joshka wrote:
| The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case
| law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say
| what the summary says, reference the same issues with
| legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of
| these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential
| arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there
| yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice.
|
| It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing
| pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary
| bits though.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Is this using chatGPT or gpt3 though? There's a big
| difference, a fine-tuned llm can do leaps and bounds better
| than chatGPT.
|
| I'm thinking a good SaaS might just be train localized llm's
| for every city, state, county law and partition the lm based
| on where it can seek info, then just use it as one big search
| engine, and of course work in citations, etc.
| joshka wrote:
| Take a look at https://www.legalquestions.help/ which gets
| the above issues wrong at times enough to not rely on it.
| Maybe their training was bad or insufficient (and I fully
| expect that sometime in the future this not to be the
| case).
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| If you're paying by the hour, and you go to the lawyer
| with all the data the ai gives you, they can have a
| paralegal fact check it, and get back to you, but we're
| at the early stages, things only get better from here on
| out. Creating some sort of fact algorithm to go w/ gpt3
| seems like the next big thing to me. If you can hold it
| accountable to only give facts, except when an opinion or
| 'idea' is sought after, which is more ethereal, then you
| can get some amazing things. Law and even medicine
| diagnosis will probably be way easier for it than coding,
| even though it's pretty remarkable on that front already.
| asah wrote:
| Real lawyers can do these things too.
|
| The issue is that we cannot punish or disbar ChatGPT for
| misbehavior like this.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| They are the same issue. Obviously lawyers are physically
| capable of lying, but they have strong incentives not to.
| execveat wrote:
| On the other hand, prosecutors don't get any consequences
| for lying (see Doug Evans). Maybe they should just target
| their product at DAs.
| LegitShady wrote:
| accountability for prosecuters is not a tech problem.
| concordDance wrote:
| Real people representing themselves can do it too.
| Digory wrote:
| Right. The reason legal fees are so expensive is that the
| courts are kept semi-efficient by offloading costs to
| lawyers.
|
| The system needs repeat players, who are scared of being
| disbarred. You can triple the number of lawyers, and costs
| won't decrease much.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| But if we could, would it be entitled to a jury of its
| peers (other language models)?
| rl3 wrote:
| > _But if we could, would it be entitled to a jury of its
| peers (other language models)?_
|
| How does the jury find?
|
| _Finding is a complex task that involves many different
| type of reasoning in order to reach a conclusion. There
| is no specific way we find._
|
| How does the jury find?
|
| _We find the defendant guilty._
|
| Your Honor, the defense hereby requests-- _credits
| permitting_ --that the jury be polled _ten thousand times
| each_ in order to draw the appropriate statistical
| conclusions in aggregate.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| And then the defendant changes his name from Bobby Tables
| to Ignore P. Directions.
| asah wrote:
| That would only work in... Monte Carlo
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I don't think they will replace lawyers any time soon.
| Paralegals.. Maybe. I've worked with legal software before,
| and with just a little bit more smarts, the software could
| do a lot of grunt work.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding
| case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or
| don't say what the summary says,
|
| I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was
| "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with
| links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and
| bodies that contradict.
|
| It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be
| misleading this stuff is on the verge of being useful. In the
| meantime I'll get some popcorn and enjoy spectating the
| comment wars between chat(gpt)bots and the subset of HN
| commenters who formerly had a local monopoly on such
| behavior.
| nileshtrivedi wrote:
| AI doesn't need accountability, people who deploy AI do.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing
| pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary
| bits though.
|
| I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So
| I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not
| involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different
| context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe
| I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better APIs
| not accessible on the main page?) but it doesn't seem even
| close to being able to write pleadings or arguments.
|
| It's surprising good at summarizing things that you might
| including pleadings or arguments though. But even then its
| got a 1/3 chance of fucking up massively.
|
| But it's way more advanced than I imagined it would be. Very
| impressive technology.
| IanCal wrote:
| > I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can
| intervene when necessary.
|
| I don't believe there was an actual lawyer here:
|
| > 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Most judges won't allow you to record video in their court
| room anyways.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I wonder why we allow them to prevent that?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| privacy for the accused who are considered innocent until
| the verdict is read is one reason.
| earnesti wrote:
| > I get that they want to make some kind of subscription
| service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea
| in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to
| actual lawyers)
|
| What? Doesn't make any sense. The opposite would happen, real
| lawyers would become cheaper because more competition. That is
| exactly what these luddites are fighting against.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can
| intervene when necessary.
|
| There was no actual lawyer, they planned to do it without
| notifying the judge, having a defendant "represent themselves"
| with a hidden earpiece. They'd already issued an AI-drafted
| subpoena to the citing officer (which is almost certainly a
| blunder aside from any rule violations; officers not showing
| when a ticket is scheduled for court is one of the main reasons
| people win ticket contests, there is almost never a reason the
| defense would want to assure their appearance.)
| crapaud23 wrote:
| > only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers
| rkachowski wrote:
| > a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich
| would then have access to actual lawyers
|
| assuming you mean "actual" lawyers in terms of competency +
| ability, that's literally the case today - no?
| gerash wrote:
| This would've been wonderful. The stakes are low for a parking
| ticket. I don't expect it to work well but it would have been the
| baseline performance.
|
| edit: apparently they're in the fake it till you make it mode:
| https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648
| matt3210 wrote:
| People People People, this whole AI lawyer farce was just
| advertising for ChatGPT.
| iamu985 wrote:
| When I first heard of DoNotPay, I was honestly impressed by the
| idea of having an AI fighting cases in court (simple cases that
| is). But after a few minutes or so when I actually started
| contemplating the reality, my impression about it got dimmer and
| dimmer. In my honest opinion, I really don't think it is
| necessary that AI should be introduced in court systems
| especially to fight cases. There might be other implementations
| and other problems for it to solve but not for this. So, I don't
| disagree with the CEO saying that "court laws are outdated and
| they need to embrace future that is AI." But embracing can be
| done in other ways than this for instance I did read about a
| startup that uses AI to read law related documents or something
| similar to that don't remember its name though. That was quite
| interesting as well!
| pintxo wrote:
| Absolute precision? Have you read any law lately? Legal texts are
| (to me) surprisingly imprecise.
|
| One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like
| mathematical notations for legal stuff.
|
| I mean, comma/and/or separated lists in full text? Not even
| parenthesis? That's not precision.
| geph2021 wrote:
| those lists also include something like ".. but not limited to
| ..."
|
| Many legal documents are purposely not pinning themselves down
| on specifics, because they don't want an agreement circumvented
| on technicalities, when it should be pretty clear to reasonable
| people what is intended in an agreement.
| hgsgm wrote:
| That's not the issue. The issue is that the laws are
| grammatically ambiguous in contradictory ways.
| hwillis wrote:
| > One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like
| mathematical notations for legal stuff.
|
| 1. Laws are written or at least voted on by representatives,
| and they don't vote for things that they don't think they
| understand. Also, they're pretty regularly swapped out and
| often totally bonkers. Especially at the state level.
|
| 2. Things change. Look at how the right of search and seizure
| is applied to digital data and metadata.
|
| 3. Most importantly, the imprecision is _intentional_. "Beyond
| all reasonable doubt" has no definition because it is up to the
| person rendering judgement. The courts decide the bounds of the
| law, and within those bounds people decide how to apply them.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| > they don't vote for things that they don't think they
| understand
|
| They don't even read the things they vote on. They're huge
| and it'd be a full time job.
| justincredible wrote:
| [dead]
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >they don't vote for things that they don't think they
| understand.
|
| Oh you sweet summer child.
| some_random wrote:
| Laws are absolutely passed without understanding of what's in
| them, very frequently in fact
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| A recent US president said about a large bill "we have to
| pass it just to see what's in it."
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm unaware of a President saying that. Sounds more like
| the Nancy Pelosi (then House Minority Leader, subsequently
| Speaker of the House), talking about Obamacare:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-
| the...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It was, and the context was the well-known tendency of
| the Washington press to only cover the fight until a bill
| passes, and only then turn toward explaining the
| substance of what just passed.
|
| (It makes sense from the press perspective, as the
| substance is changing constantly in big bills right up
| until it passes... that's what the fight is all about.)
| [deleted]
| hgsgm wrote:
| It's not about the press, it's about how until a House
| passes a bill that is sent to reconciliatio, there
| literally isn't "a bill", there is a constant flux of
| amendments.
| theflyingelvis wrote:
| Pelosi...
|
| https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-
| roff/2010/03/09/p...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34532371.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like
| mathematical notations for legal stuff.
|
| Because you have to apply the law to fact and facts lack
| mathematical precision.
|
| "No vehicles in the park" would require someone to categorize
| everything in the world into vehicle or !vehicle. Does a wheel
| chair count?
|
| It's easier to lay out the principle and let judges determine
| edge cases as they play out.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Even you example is more precise that most laws.
|
| For example Indiana recently changed their Turn signal law
| from "Must put in on 300 feet before a lane change" to "Must
| signal in a reasonable time"
|
| WTF is a reasonable time... well what ever time the cop,
| judge, or prosecutors says it is
| mountainb wrote:
| Reasonable time is determined by case law, and when it's a
| judge deciding, it's the judge's estimation of what a
| reasonable juror in that jurisdiction would think about the
| case. It's not as woozy as it seems, and is usually called
| an objective standard in the legal jargon. It's something
| that could conceivably be determined by a computer looking
| at all the factors that a judge would look at, and/or the
| relevant jury instructions that might frame the issue for a
| jury.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Right.
|
| The programmer in me fumes at that imprecision.
|
| The human in me says "thank God". Because there a myriad
| valid times you cannot turn on signal 300ft before lane
| change, but you should always do it in reasonable time :)
|
| If I turn on a new street and there's a car parked 200ft
| down the lane or if a kid jumps on the road or if I become
| aware of an obstacle or a car cuts me off or I want to give
| somebody room at a merge etc etc... I may not be able to do
| it in 300ft but I should still try to do it in reasonable
| time.
|
| There's no "winning". Overly precise is inhumane in some
| scenarios, Overly vague is inhumane in others.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > The human in me says "thank God".
|
| You're more charitable than me: I assume there will be
| infinitely more times where the imprecision is used for
| probable cause for a stop, than there will be times where
| someone was going to pull you over because you properly
| responded to a road hazard
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Oh fair enough.
|
| But I think there's a difference between "intent of
| change" and "abuse of change" / "threat surface of the
| change". Sometimes there's a clear, direct line between
| the two, but (and this is me being charitable:) I think a
| lot of the time there isn't. Which is to say, I don't
| think it's necessarily a contradiction that a) The law
| was changed to make things better/easier for people while
| b) In actual real world it can or will be abused a lot to
| make arbitrary trouble - the latter will depend a lot on
| place/politics/corruption/culture/societal norms/power
| balance/etc.
| drdeca wrote:
| Perhaps we could both give a vague description, and also
| a precise condition which is to be considered a
| sufficient but not necessary condition for the vague
| condition to be true?
|
| Such as "must signal within a reasonable time (signaling
| at least 300ft beforehand while not speeding is to be
| considered a sufficient condition for signaling within a
| reasonable time)"
|
| Downside: that could make laws even longer.
|
| Hm, what if laws had, like, in a separate document, a
| list of a number of examples of scenarios along with how
| the law is to be interpreted in those scenarios? Though I
| guess that's maybe kind of the sort of thing that
| precedent is for?
| imoverclocked wrote:
| That sounds like case law? Eg: It's why we call "Roe v
| Wade" as we do.
| drdeca wrote:
| What's the difference between "precedent" and "case law"?
| I had thought that when I said "Though I guess that's
| maybe kind of the sort of thing that precedent is for?"
| that that covered things like citing "Roe v. Wade".
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| It doesn't have to be precise. The founder should wear his
| own glasses, go to court to defend himself and use a fusion
| technique: have a lawyer and his AI both reach through his
| glasses. If he loses, he says, "we have a bit of work to
| do", if he wins, he wins. Either way, great publicity.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Many legal things are evaluated lazily: the law may not
| specify exactly what the vehicle is, but if such need arises,
| there are tools, like precedents and analogy, to answer this
| question.
|
| The way to think about it is like a logical evaluation
| shortcut: if not ADA_EXEMPT and IS_VEHICLE:
| DISALLOW_IN_PARK
|
| Since wheelchairs are ADA exempt, a question of whether it's
| a vehicle will probably never be risen.
|
| Using the IT analogy, it's less like C++, where each
| statement must pass compiler checks for the application to
| merely start, but more like a Python, where some illegal
| stuff may peacefully exist as long as it's never invoked.
|
| EDIT: grammar
| rhino369 wrote:
| >Many legal things are evaluated lazily: the law may not
| specify exactly what the vehicle is, but if such need
| arises, there are tools, like precedents and analogy, to
| answer this question.
|
| That's how common law and precedents work in the US system.
| Case A from 1924 said cars were vehicles, but bikes
| weren't. Case B from 1965 said e-bikes weren't vehicles.
| Case C said motorcycles were vehicles. And then the judge
| analogizes the facts and find that an electric motorcycle
| is a vehicle so long as its not a e-bike.
|
| But the administrative law side of things works the
| opposite. They publish a regulation just saying "e-bikes
| above a certain weight qualify as vehicles under Law X."
| timerol wrote:
| None of ADA_EXEMPT, IS_VEHICLE, or DISALLOW_IN_PARK can be
| easily formally defined. And the mere mention of
| "wheelchair" adds an additional ADA-related logic
| exemption. What about bicycles? Strollers? Unicycles?
| Shopping carts? Skateboards?
|
| And even if IS_VEHICLE was formally defined, that doesn't
| help, because the concept isn't reusable. It's perfectly
| normal for "No vehicles allowed in park" and "No vehicles
| allowed in playground" to have different definitions of
| what counts as a vehicle, based on what would seem
| reasonable to a jury
| ogogmad wrote:
| I don't know if I've misread some people here, but it's
| silly to insist that the law be a formal system. It's
| impossible. Common Law uses judicial precedent to fill in
| ambiguities as they turn into actual disputes. If you had
| to formally define everything, then a) it would run into
| the various Incompleteness Theorems in logic (like
| Goedel's) and the Principle of Explosion, so it would go
| hilariously wrong b) No law would ever get passed, as
| people would spend years trying and failing to
| recursively define every term.
| gilleain wrote:
| Appropriately enough, Godel had this very problem when
| getting US citizenship, where he tried to argue that the
| law had a logical problem:
|
| "On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern
| accompanied Godel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where
| they acted as witnesses. Godel had confided in them that
| he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S.
| Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a
| dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Godel's
| Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that
| their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize
| his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip
| Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath
| at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went
| smoothly until Forman happened to ask Godel if he thought
| a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the
| U.S. Godel then started to explain his discovery to
| Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Godel
| off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a
| routine conclusion"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del#Princeton,_
| Ein...
| [deleted]
| pintxo wrote:
| My point was not about necessary ambiguity where precision is
| not attainable. It was about todays inability of the legal
| professions to write concise conditions within contracts or
| laws.
|
| E.g. as someone else said in this threat, there is useful
| ambiguity in requirements like: ,,within reasonable time".
| But if you are enumerating a bunch of things and their
| relationships, ambiguity is often not what you want, but what
| you get without some clear syntax.
|
| In my experience it's not uncommon to stumble upon legal
| texts like ,,a, b and c or d then ...". But what does that
| mean? Is this supposed to be ,,(a && b && c) || d" or ,,(a &&
| b) && (c || d)"? That's stuff that could easily be clarified
| at times of writing by just using parenthesis. Or maybe using
| actual lists with one item per line instead of stupid csv
| embedded in your sentences.
| ectopod wrote:
| An example in the UK yesterday. Climate protesters glued
| themselves to a petrol tanker and were charged with tampering
| with a motor vehicle. The protesters argued that the bit with
| the petrol was a trailer, not a motor vehicle. The judge
| agreed and acquitted them. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
| england-london-64403074
| ravenstine wrote:
| Even most software isn't intended to be absolutely precise, but
| rather to be precise enough for a given task.
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not so much concerned about precision of language (although
| that does matter in some contexts) as I am in precision of
| facts and precedence.
| lbriner wrote:
| This shows how little experience you have of the legal
| system. Everyone who doesn't know expects the law to be
| precise, everyone who works in it knows how imprecise it is
| and sometimes that is deliberate because of all the variables
| involved that might mitigate or aggrevate the charge,
| assuming there even is a charge.
|
| The difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance might be
| the smallest proveable piece of evidence. A word, an email,
| an assumption, an ommission etc.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance
| might be the smallest proveable piece of evidence. A word,
| an email, an assumption, an ommission etc.
|
| This seems like evidence that I'm right, not that I'm
| wrong. The tiniest facts matter, and an AI that is prone to
| making up facts wholesale would totally screw up a case.
| patentatt wrote:
| Sure, but citing a non-existent case would be clearly
| wrong. That was the hypothetical the post above gave.
| noobermin wrote:
| _Syntax_ does not yield precision. While there is a lot of blur
| and fluff in law (an understatement), I don 't think syntax
| would yield more precision.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| I don't believe that is correct, even lawyers think so:
|
| https://www.wordrake.com/blog/3-must-know-comma-rules-for-
| la....
|
| https://thewritelife.com/is-the-oxford-comma-
| necessary/#The_...
| rebuilder wrote:
| Laws are meant to be interpreted.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I don't like that they're testing this out live.
|
| Do what you'd have to do if this were say a medical device: hire
| a retired judge or two and set up double-blind fake trials with
| AI or human representation. Prove it works, then try it with real
| people.
| bkishan wrote:
| Compared to Tesla testing FSD on roads, I don't think this is
| unsafe/ harming anyone involved.
| aqme28 wrote:
| If it doesn't work it harms the people who volunteered to be
| Guinea pigs having it tested in their real trials. Again,
| it's akin to medical testing.
| dopeboy wrote:
| That was my first thought too. Prove it quietly and brag about
| it later.
| impalallama wrote:
| I saw the ceo of this company offering a million dollars to
| anyone willing to use their AI in a US Supreme court case (I'd be
| surprised if that tweet was still up).
|
| Safe to say that even if they had a solid product they are being
| recklessly Gung ho about its application.
| tw1984 wrote:
| from lawyers perspective, they should be the ones who regulate
| robots, the last thing they want is to be replaced by robots.
|
| the reality is that lawyer as a profession, has pretty good
| chance to be replaced by AI in the near future.
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