3 ms·

Why will this lead to summary judgement to the plaintiff, neither side has presented concrete proofs, just assertions. Serious question.

maxbond 4y ago
The standard in US civil court is preponderance of evidence, not reasonable doubt. You'd have to go further then making an assertion (by bringing in an expert witness or something) but you don't necessarily have to prove something definitively. You just have to make the more compelling argument - you have to present evidence that it's more likely that your position is correct. Since the hypothetical AI company wasn't able to produce anything in it's defense, it lost. IANAL
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > you don't have to prove anything, strictly speaking. Strictly speaking, you do have to prove things (if you have the burden of proof on the specific issue), and the standard of proof is usually “preponderance of the evidence” (though there are a few other standards that apply to particular issues/circumstances in the civil justice system.) “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a different standard of proof used for conviction in the criminal justice system, but it is strictly not correct to call proof under other standards something other than proof.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    For sure, I was responding to the idea of "concrete proof" and why it didn't need to be "concrete proof," but I'm sure you're right. Thanks for keeping me honest. I've edited my comment to reflect your correction.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- newswasboring 4y ago
  But Disney also didn't present anything. Can the court case really be decided based on only expert witnesses?
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I've been avoiding giving an answer in case someone who knew better than me came around (open invitation), but afaik expert testimony is evidence and the case is decided on the best evidence. So why not? You'll have to do some work to establish the expertise of the witness, and the opposing side might attack those credentials and such and they'll probably produce their own expert rather than just rolling over, but in principle you could have an entire case that consists of various expert testimony. I don't think the suggestion is meant to be that this is a realistic scenario though, just that the court isn't as mechanical and naive as we programmers are prone to imagining (being stewards of systems that are largely mechanical and naive). IANAL
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
obviously what I said is not an actual court case and is meant to be a facetious condensation of what would happen. so after the several days when Disney shows how this LLM was obviously trained on the dataset of available Disney content, and then the defendant responded that they trained on a corpus of pseudo-Disney but then could not produce this corpus it would be reasonable to conclude they were lying. The parent suggested "No one will be able to prove the source of the data" and that is the kind of thing that programmers for some reason often think is some fantastic gotcha so one can really get away with anything, but it is these kinds of things that the law is generally pretty good in handling.

maxbond 4y ago

The standard in US civil court is preponderance of evidence, not reasonable doubt. You'd have to go further then making an assertion (by bringing in an expert witness or something) but you don't necessarily have to prove something definitively. You just have to make the more compelling argument - you have to present evidence that it's more likely that your position is correct. Since the hypothetical AI company wasn't able to produce anything in it's defense, it lost. IANAL

dragonwriter 4y ago
> you don't have to prove anything, strictly speaking. Strictly speaking, you do have to prove things (if you have the burden of proof on the specific issue), and the standard of proof is usually “preponderance of the evidence” (though there are a few other standards that apply to particular issues/circumstances in the civil justice system.) “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a different standard of proof used for conviction in the criminal justice system, but it is strictly not correct to call proof under other standards something other than proof.
- maxbond 4y ago
  For sure, I was responding to the idea of "concrete proof" and why it didn't need to be "concrete proof," but I'm sure you're right. Thanks for keeping me honest. I've edited my comment to reflect your correction.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
newswasboring 4y ago
But Disney also didn't present anything. Can the court case really be decided based on only expert witnesses?
- maxbond 4y ago
  I've been avoiding giving an answer in case someone who knew better than me came around (open invitation), but afaik expert testimony is evidence and the case is decided on the best evidence. So why not? You'll have to do some work to establish the expertise of the witness, and the opposing side might attack those credentials and such and they'll probably produce their own expert rather than just rolling over, but in principle you could have an entire case that consists of various expert testimony. I don't think the suggestion is meant to be that this is a realistic scenario though, just that the court isn't as mechanical and naive as we programmers are prone to imagining (being stewards of systems that are largely mechanical and naive). IANAL

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

obviously what I said is not an actual court case and is meant to be a facetious condensation of what would happen. so after the several days when Disney shows how this LLM was obviously trained on the dataset of available Disney content, and then the defendant responded that they trained on a corpus of pseudo-Disney but then could not produce this corpus it would be reasonable to conclude they were lying. The parent suggested "No one will be able to prove the source of the data" and that is the kind of thing that programmers for some reason often think is some fantastic gotcha so one can really get away with anything, but it is these kinds of things that the law is generally pretty good in handling.