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

484 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

giantg2 4y ago
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.
Maursault 4y ago
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 4y ago
  And when the AI starts fabricating fictitious citations for cases, disbar it, and ban it and its developers from practicing law?
- daveslash 4y ago
  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" ;)
sleepybrett 4y ago
I'm starting to side with the Butlerian Jihad, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"
curtis3389 4y ago
Kafka hit the nail on the head with this one: https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html
fijiaarone 4y ago
Shakespeare was right.
axpy906 4y ago
Upvoted. We need to automate lawyers. My vote is for this.
matt3210 4y ago
People People People, this whole AI lawyer farce was just advertising for ChatGPT.
chadlavi 4y ago
It was a publicity stunt that was never going to actually happen. The point was to make news.
paul_funyun 4y ago
An AI lawyer, operating within reasonable bounds, could absolutely be an asset to criminal defendants and parties to civil litigation. You could reduce a basic discovery request to mad libs. I'd go so far as to say you could do the same with motions for summary judgment, requesting depositions, and other things. They wouldn't be optimal, but they wouldn't be of a level worthy of sanctions. It's just protectionism from the private bar who doesn't want to lose easy billables, and fear from prosecutors, creditors, and the like who realize that their system would collapse if half their opposition could force them to do some real lawyering a time or two. If every criminal defendant and debtor could squeeze three hours of drafting documents and individualized courtroom attention out of opposing counsel, it wouldn't be the guy using the AI coming out worse than the status quo. You can argue that the consequences would be negative for society, but it's laughable to say they'd be negative for litigants. DCS can barely knock down scarecrows; a few mediocre pleadings that demand a response from child support obligees and other parties would send them crying into early retirement.
PostOnce 4y ago
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.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Can you please find me a licensed lawyer for less than the price of a parking ticket?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin someone's life?
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Today, parking ticket. Tomorrow, DUI. Next week, a murder case. It's about putting the first wedge in.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        > 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.
raydiatian 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Ahaha
  - msla 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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?
monkeydust 4y ago
Hardly surprising, you try to automate lawyers they are going to get litigious.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I think lawyers will be at pains to demonstrate how laughably bad the AI is when pushed. I don't blame them.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Eh, it would probably beat some bad lawyers
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    That's stage two. If the blanket ban-via-threatening-letters doesn't work.
- rvz 4y ago
  Exactly, Unsurprising that DoNotPay was going to get sued to the ground and had to back out.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    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.
- JoBrad 4y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648
jeroenhd 4y ago
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.
- crapaud23 4y ago
  > only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers
- epups 4y ago
  > 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.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    >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.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      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?
Barrin92 4y ago
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?
- rvz 4y ago
  > Is this going to be the new grift in the industry? It already is a new grift. The same AI snake oil scam to be another VC exit scam to the next sucker. DoNotPay is just one of the many AI scams.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blitzar 4y ago
The Ai robot lost the argument to be permitted to argue in court.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dubcanada 4y ago
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.
- eru 4y ago
  > 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.
  - dubcanada 4y ago
    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.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    > A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you either. She can be sued and lose her license.
    - 4y ago
sublinear 4y ago
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.
dools 4y ago
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!
- parsimo2010 4y ago
  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.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    >"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.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
iamu985 4y ago
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!
residualmind 4y ago
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...
markogrady 4y ago
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?
- NoboruWataya 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
ergocoder 4y ago
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-bulletproof-vest-shooting/ https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/aug/22/case-dropped-in-b... What a strange way of having freedom.
drKarl 4y ago
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.
ghusto 4y ago
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.
squarefoot 4y ago
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.
- autoexec 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What about when the lawyer tech becomes open source and you can have your own personal lawyer in your pocket at all times?
    - squarefoot 4y ago
      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.
- saint_fiasco 4y ago
aqme28 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Compared to Tesla testing FSD on roads, I don't think this is unsafe/ harming anyone involved.
  - aqme28 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  That was my first thought too. Prove it quietly and brag about it later.
shireboy 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
sandworm101 4y ago
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 https://youtu.be/H8DIwNfIijU
451mov 4y ago
I read this as "real lawyers shut down chatGPT in court room" not that lawyers prevented it from even actually happening.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
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.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
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 4y ago
  >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.
tw1984 4y ago
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.
bilekas 4y ago
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 4y ago
  No, the problem is that you need to be licensed to give legal advice. And the chatbot is not a licensed lawyer.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    It's also not a person.
brokenodo 4y ago
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 https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l...
- ericd 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
amelius 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
jwsteigerwalt 4y ago
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.
concordDance 4y ago
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.
pseingatl 4y ago
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.
renewiltord 4y ago
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.
pierrebai 4y ago
Another instance of the irreconcilable dichotomy of: "no one shall ignore the law" and "only lawyers can understand the law".
- GuB-42 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - anticensor 4y ago
      > as in, yes, you have the option to not use a lawyer Not always the case. In some criminal cases, it is legally required to represent yourself with a lawyer. IANAL, though.
impalallama 4y ago
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.
lolinder 4y ago
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.
- intrasight 4y ago
  >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.
  - geraneum 4y ago
    > I would argue that AI-based tools could prevent such HUMAN mistakes. Still you won’t find a useful/sober lawyer who would argue a case in front of a judge based on a made up precedent which never existed in reality. Making a mistake as you put it, in humans, is quite different than “hallucinations” of an LLM. The practical AI tool that is good for preventing such human mistakes (precisely) doesn’t exist _yet_.
- chrsig 4y ago
  > 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.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I agree in many cases, except traffic court isn’t real court. It’s mostly procedural. Hell in my state, in many cases the judge is a person who wins an election and takes a 20 hour course, and prosecutions are conducted by police officers. Lawyers like to wax about the interests of justice. Reality is for crap like this, it’s a revenue funnel where there’s a pecking order of people who get breaks. Some small fraction have an actual legal dispute of facts. I’d argue that you could best serve the interests of justice by bringing the whole process online. You’d eliminate the “friends and family” discount and have a real tribunal process for cases that need it, instead of the cattle call and mockery that these courts are. NYC actually does a decent job with this by outsourcing the whole thing to DMV and administrative law judges on a tight leash. It’s mostly justice by flowchart. That pushes bullshit down to the police.
alpineidyll3 4y ago
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.
jtode 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You love to see it.
ulizzle 4y ago
We are calling these things A.I, as if they were really intelligent; do they understand the concept of qualia?
pintxo 4y ago
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.
- lolinder 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - patentatt 4y ago
      Sure, but citing a non-existent case would be clearly wrong. That was the hypothetical the post above gave.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      > 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.
- hwillis 4y ago
  > 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.
elicksaur 4y ago
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.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What do you believe licensure would solve?
    - asciimov 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago
sbaiddn 4y ago
"Move fast and break things" should be followed by "commit criminal negligence and go to jail!"
stevespang 4y ago
[dead]
qwerty456127 4y ago
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.
the_arun 4y ago
We will soon see AI Physicians, Counsellors etc., Is IBM's Watson still in use?
DonHopkins 4y ago
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.
- knodi123 4y ago
  https://i2.wp.com/circalingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CouldNotConnect_0.jpg https://i2.wp.com/circalingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11...
joshuaheard 4y ago
"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 4y ago
  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.
rzwitserloot 4y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  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.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
jwithington 4y ago
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.
minhazm 4y ago
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.
ok123456 4y ago
An AI based lawyer but it's been trained on Darrell Brooks.
gerash 4y ago
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 https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648
jedberg 4y ago
"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.
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
Sounds like those lawyers are scared!
DaTaLa33 4y ago
We will get rid of them
1024core 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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?"
71a54xd 4y ago
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.
tahoeskibum 4y ago
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/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/ind...
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  You're not going to get a white shoe law firm partner to come to court to contest your parking ticket unless you are that lawyer yourself, so barely passing is good enough. The only thing to worry about is if the exam grading doesn't allow negative marks for disbarment-level answers, that barely passing score might not be giving us enough information.
  - bob_theslob646 4y ago
    >You're not going to get a white shoe law firm partner to come to court to contest your parking ticket unless you are that lawyer yourself, so barely passing is good enough But what if that white shoe law firm is using chatGPT to respond to your emails and gather information about your case and then billing you? If they use it, does that make it okay?
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
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.
- rideontime 4y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648
  - eaurouge 4y ago
    No, the service doesn’t work. It’s just marketing and PR.
- dmix 4y ago
  It's someone's gimmicky app idea that blew up into something way bigger than it was.
legitster 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  The solution certainly isn't to allow charlatans to exploit those of lesser means.
  - bob_theslob646 4y ago
    >exploit That's a really funny use of the word, considering that the whole purpose of what they're trying to do is the opposite of exploit those of lesser means. If you can explain to me how what they're trying to do is going to is by definition of the word "exploit" then I will change my mind, otherwise otherwise I will continue to think you have no idea how ironic it is for someone offering an equivalent service or something that will be the equivalent service for a much lower cost as "exploiting someone." It seems like the legal industry doesn't like competition.
    - rideontime 4y ago
      "Equivalent service"? Lol. https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648 https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648
shmerl 4y ago
> 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?
whycome 4y ago
How long until someone deems this 'aiphobic'?
gamblor956 4y ago
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.
freitzkriesler 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I know which is probably why this was a proof of concept with what would have been abysmal results.
    - samtp 4y ago
      This sentiment seems to be completely at odds with your first comment.
      - freitzkriesler 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.

484 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

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.

Maursault 4y ago

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 4y ago
And when the AI starts fabricating fictitious citations for cases, disbar it, and ban it and its developers from practicing law?
daveslash 4y ago
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" ;)

sleepybrett 4y ago

I'm starting to side with the Butlerian Jihad, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"

curtis3389 4y ago

Kafka hit the nail on the head with this one: https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html https://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

fijiaarone 4y ago

Shakespeare was right.

axpy906 4y ago

Upvoted. We need to automate lawyers. My vote is for this.

matt3210 4y ago

People People People, this whole AI lawyer farce was just advertising for ChatGPT.

chadlavi 4y ago

It was a publicity stunt that was never going to actually happen. The point was to make news.

paul_funyun 4y ago

An AI lawyer, operating within reasonable bounds, could absolutely be an asset to criminal defendants and parties to civil litigation. You could reduce a basic discovery request to mad libs. I'd go so far as to say you could do the same with motions for summary judgment, requesting depositions, and other things. They wouldn't be optimal, but they wouldn't be of a level worthy of sanctions. It's just protectionism from the private bar who doesn't want to lose easy billables, and fear from prosecutors, creditors, and the like who realize that their system would collapse if half their opposition could force them to do some real lawyering a time or two. If every criminal defendant and debtor could squeeze three hours of drafting documents and individualized courtroom attention out of opposing counsel, it wouldn't be the guy using the AI coming out worse than the status quo. You can argue that the consequences would be negative for society, but it's laughable to say they'd be negative for litigants. DCS can barely knock down scarecrows; a few mediocre pleadings that demand a response from child support obligees and other parties would send them crying into early retirement.

PostOnce 4y ago

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.

xiphias2 4y ago
Can you please find me a licensed lawyer for less than the price of a parking ticket?
charcircuit 4y ago
How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin someone's life?
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Today, parking ticket. Tomorrow, DUI. Next week, a murder case. It's about putting the first wedge in.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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.

raydiatian 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Ahaha
- msla 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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?

monkeydust 4y ago

Hardly surprising, you try to automate lawyers they are going to get litigious.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I think lawyers will be at pains to demonstrate how laughably bad the AI is when pushed. I don't blame them.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Eh, it would probably beat some bad lawyers
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  That's stage two. If the blanket ban-via-threatening-letters doesn't work.
rvz 4y ago
Exactly, Unsurprising that DoNotPay was going to get sued to the ground and had to back out.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  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.
JoBrad 4y ago
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 https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648

jeroenhd 4y ago

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.

crapaud23 4y ago
> only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers
epups 4y ago
> 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.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  >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.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    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?

Barrin92 4y ago

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?

rvz 4y ago
> Is this going to be the new grift in the industry? It already is a new grift. The same AI snake oil scam to be another VC exit scam to the next sucker. DoNotPay is just one of the many AI scams.
mach1ne 4y ago
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.

deleted 4y ago

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blitzar 4y ago

The Ai robot lost the argument to be permitted to argue in court.

deleted 4y ago
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dubcanada 4y ago

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.

eru 4y ago
> 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.
- dubcanada 4y ago
  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.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you either. She can be sued and lose her license.
  - 4y ago

sublinear 4y ago

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.

dools 4y ago

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!

parsimo2010 4y ago
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.
- freejazz 4y ago
  >"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.
- tialaramex 4y ago

iamu985 4y ago

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!

residualmind 4y ago

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...

markogrady 4y ago

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?

NoboruWataya 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

ergocoder 4y ago

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-bulletproof-vest-shooting/ https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/aug/22/case-dropped-in-b... What a strange way of having freedom.

drKarl 4y ago

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.

ghusto 4y ago

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.

squarefoot 4y ago

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.

autoexec 4y ago
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 4y ago
  What about when the lawyer tech becomes open source and you can have your own personal lawyer in your pocket at all times?
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    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.
saint_fiasco 4y ago

aqme28 4y ago

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 4y ago
Compared to Tesla testing FSD on roads, I don't think this is unsafe/ harming anyone involved.
- aqme28 4y ago
  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 4y ago
That was my first thought too. Prove it quietly and brag about it later.

shireboy 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

sandworm101 4y ago

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 https://youtu.be/H8DIwNfIijU

451mov 4y ago

I read this as "real lawyers shut down chatGPT in court room" not that lawyers prevented it from even actually happening.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

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.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

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 4y ago
>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.

tw1984 4y ago

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.

bilekas 4y ago

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 4y ago
No, the problem is that you need to be licensed to give legal advice. And the chatbot is not a licensed lawyer.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  It's also not a person.

brokenodo 4y ago

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 https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l...

ericd 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.

amelius 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense

jwsteigerwalt 4y ago

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.

concordDance 4y ago

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.

pseingatl 4y ago

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.

renewiltord 4y ago

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.

pierrebai 4y ago

Another instance of the irreconcilable dichotomy of: "no one shall ignore the law" and "only lawyers can understand the law".

GuB-42 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    > as in, yes, you have the option to not use a lawyer Not always the case. In some criminal cases, it is legally required to represent yourself with a lawyer. IANAL, though.

impalallama 4y ago

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.

lolinder 4y ago

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.

intrasight 4y ago
>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.
- geraneum 4y ago
  > I would argue that AI-based tools could prevent such HUMAN mistakes. Still you won’t find a useful/sober lawyer who would argue a case in front of a judge based on a made up precedent which never existed in reality. Making a mistake as you put it, in humans, is quite different than “hallucinations” of an LLM. The practical AI tool that is good for preventing such human mistakes (precisely) doesn’t exist _yet_.
chrsig 4y ago
> 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.
Spooky23 4y ago
I agree in many cases, except traffic court isn’t real court. It’s mostly procedural. Hell in my state, in many cases the judge is a person who wins an election and takes a 20 hour course, and prosecutions are conducted by police officers. Lawyers like to wax about the interests of justice. Reality is for crap like this, it’s a revenue funnel where there’s a pecking order of people who get breaks. Some small fraction have an actual legal dispute of facts. I’d argue that you could best serve the interests of justice by bringing the whole process online. You’d eliminate the “friends and family” discount and have a real tribunal process for cases that need it, instead of the cattle call and mockery that these courts are. NYC actually does a decent job with this by outsourcing the whole thing to DMV and administrative law judges on a tight leash. It’s mostly justice by flowchart. That pushes bullshit down to the police.

alpineidyll3 4y ago

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.

jtode 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You love to see it.

ulizzle 4y ago

We are calling these things A.I, as if they were really intelligent; do they understand the concept of qualia?

pintxo 4y ago

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.

lolinder 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - patentatt 4y ago
    Sure, but citing a non-existent case would be clearly wrong. That was the hypothetical the post above gave.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    > 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.
hwillis 4y ago
> 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.

elicksaur 4y ago

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.

rbanffy 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  What do you believe licensure would solve?
  - asciimov 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago

sbaiddn 4y ago

"Move fast and break things" should be followed by "commit criminal negligence and go to jail!"

stevespang 4y ago

[dead]

qwerty456127 4y ago

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.

the_arun 4y ago

We will soon see AI Physicians, Counsellors etc., Is IBM's Watson still in use?

DonHopkins 4y ago

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.

knodi123 4y ago
https://i2.wp.com/circalingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CouldNotConnect_0.jpg https://i2.wp.com/circalingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11...

joshuaheard 4y ago

"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 4y ago
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.

rzwitserloot 4y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
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.
wpietri 4y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

jwithington 4y ago

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.

minhazm 4y ago

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.

ok123456 4y ago

An AI based lawyer but it's been trained on Darrell Brooks.

gerash 4y ago

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 https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648

jedberg 4y ago

"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.

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

Sounds like those lawyers are scared!

DaTaLa33 4y ago

We will get rid of them

1024core 4y ago

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 4y ago
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?"

71a54xd 4y ago

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.

tahoeskibum 4y ago

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/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/26/tech/chatgpt-passes-exams/ind...

lern_too_spel 4y ago
You're not going to get a white shoe law firm partner to come to court to contest your parking ticket unless you are that lawyer yourself, so barely passing is good enough. The only thing to worry about is if the exam grading doesn't allow negative marks for disbarment-level answers, that barely passing score might not be giving us enough information.
- bob_theslob646 4y ago
  >You're not going to get a white shoe law firm partner to come to court to contest your parking ticket unless you are that lawyer yourself, so barely passing is good enough But what if that white shoe law firm is using chatGPT to respond to your emails and gather information about your case and then billing you? If they use it, does that make it okay?

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

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.

rideontime 4y ago
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 https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648
- eaurouge 4y ago
  No, the service doesn’t work. It’s just marketing and PR.
dmix 4y ago
It's someone's gimmicky app idea that blew up into something way bigger than it was.

legitster 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
The solution certainly isn't to allow charlatans to exploit those of lesser means.
- bob_theslob646 4y ago
  >exploit That's a really funny use of the word, considering that the whole purpose of what they're trying to do is the opposite of exploit those of lesser means. If you can explain to me how what they're trying to do is going to is by definition of the word "exploit" then I will change my mind, otherwise otherwise I will continue to think you have no idea how ironic it is for someone offering an equivalent service or something that will be the equivalent service for a much lower cost as "exploiting someone." It seems like the legal industry doesn't like competition.
  - rideontime 4y ago
    "Equivalent service"? Lol. https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648 https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648

shmerl 4y ago

> 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?

whycome 4y ago

How long until someone deems this 'aiphobic'?

gamblor956 4y ago

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.

freitzkriesler 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I know which is probably why this was a proof of concept with what would have been abysmal results.
  - samtp 4y ago
    This sentiment seems to be completely at odds with your first comment.
    - freitzkriesler 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.