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One of the few things I can currently see GPT do well is helping find legal precedence. Rather than having five law students roam through old cases, it would ma

One of the few things I can currently see GPT do well is helping find legal precedence. Rather than having five law students roam through old cases, it would make sense to feed 100+ years of legal rulings into the model and then query the AI for any previous rulings similar to your own, with the desired outcome. That would allow lawyers to state question like: In cases like this, which evidence or arguments caused the ruling to favor the accused. You still need a human to make the case, present the arguments and adapt every to the current situation, but there's no reason to have human search through thousands of cases and write summaries, not when an AI can do it in an instance.

Maken 4y ago
I would argue that GPT3 is way better at the last task, while also baking it with with a dozen or so made-up previous rulings that nobody will bother to check.
flanked-evergl 4y ago
> One of the few things I can currently see GPT do well is helping find legal precedence. GPT is really not good at finding anything, and actually it can't find anything. It is not designed to do that. It is designed to make things up. The difference may be subtle, but it is quite important. GPT makes up APIs, citations, tools, papers and rules. It makes up anything really. What it makes up is incredibly plausible, as it was trained to be as plausible as possible, to the point of being correct most of the time, but it still is just making things up. If you use it with some different expectation you will be disappointed.
- vasilipupkin 4y ago
  I keep seeing comments along these lines. It doesn’t “make things up”. It outputs text under the objective function of maximizing probability of the token being outputted as “making sense” on some criteria. So, actually, it is biased towards not making things up. Occasionally, it hallucinates. I suspect we’ll see subsequent versions hallucinate less and less.
  - bryankaplan 4y ago
    So what you're saying is it makes things up.
    - vasilipupkin 4y ago
      It occasionally does. But it’s biased against it. It doesn’t make things up as it’s default behavior.
willyt 4y ago
But then how do the humans coming up through the system gain the breadth of knowledge and experience required to carry out the more complicated senoir roles.

Maken 4y ago

I would argue that GPT3 is way better at the last task, while also baking it with with a dozen or so made-up previous rulings that nobody will bother to check.

flanked-evergl 4y ago

> One of the few things I can currently see GPT do well is helping find legal precedence. GPT is really not good at finding anything, and actually it can't find anything. It is not designed to do that. It is designed to make things up. The difference may be subtle, but it is quite important. GPT makes up APIs, citations, tools, papers and rules. It makes up anything really. What it makes up is incredibly plausible, as it was trained to be as plausible as possible, to the point of being correct most of the time, but it still is just making things up. If you use it with some different expectation you will be disappointed.

vasilipupkin 4y ago
I keep seeing comments along these lines. It doesn’t “make things up”. It outputs text under the objective function of maximizing probability of the token being outputted as “making sense” on some criteria. So, actually, it is biased towards not making things up. Occasionally, it hallucinates. I suspect we’ll see subsequent versions hallucinate less and less.
- bryankaplan 4y ago
  So what you're saying is it makes things up.
  - vasilipupkin 4y ago
    It occasionally does. But it’s biased against it. It doesn’t make things up as it’s default behavior.

willyt 4y ago

But then how do the humans coming up through the system gain the breadth of knowledge and experience required to carry out the more complicated senoir roles.