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Brazilian city enacts an ordinance that was written by ChatGPT
- andersa 3y agoWhy does it matter if chatgpt wrote it, if the result is sensible?
- wjb3 3y agoI tend to agree with you.
- vincnetas 3y agoI have suspicion that it was jus skimmed by readers. Would by nice to get original document.
- dieselgate 3y agoI agree for select ad hoc cases but a chatbot seems unreliable enough to not be, at current, sustainable or scalable for this purpose. The article mentions "dangerous precedent" along with > It may not always be able to account for the nuances and complexities of the law. Because ChatGPT is a machine learning system, it may not have the same level of understanding and judgment as a human lawyer when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedent. This could lead to problems in situations where a more in-depth legal analysis is required which seem fair at present moment.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoAccording to a friend who is a senior partner at a major class action firm many law firms are heavily relying on GPT4 (including his own). However in his firm it’s used to generate drafts and summarize large boiler plate documents. Humans always meticulously review and revise the drafts and the summaries done by humans are so likely to be flawed as documents grow just due to signal to noise ratios that the GPT4 analysis is more accurate.
- gpderetta 3y ago> Humans always meticulously review and revise the drafts The risk of course is that they might get complacent, trust the output too much, and errors will start slipping in. Especially if the error rate is lower than human and the throughput is higher than they can effectively review. But this is not necessarily an LLM issue per-se.
- 6510 3y agoIf humans stop doing it they will get worse at it. A race to the bottom if you like.
- loa_in_ 3y agoMost mistakes come from exhaustion specific to the task, at least in my experience. Also that reading mostly correct material leads to errors being spotted more easily, again in my personal experience.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoDid we get worse at maths by using computers to do our computation?
- andersa 3y agoWorse at doing calculations manually? Absolutely. How many people have done a long division on paper in the last 10 years? Could remember immediately how to do it, not having done it since school? But does that matter, if it lets us get better at applying it to larger and larger problems?
- 6510 3y agoI did one for an arithmetic function some months ago because I wasn't going to use a math lib. I had to watch no less than 3 children's youtube videos to remember how to do it. Not sure if remember is still the right word, I didn't do it since I learn it in school.
- gnopgnip 3y agoWould you use a dictionary if it gave a plausible but wrong answer 5% of the time?
- 15457345234 3y agoMany people will say yes to this question until you give them a very obviously hazardous example of what can result.
- andybak 3y agoI don't recall using a dictionary in a safety-critical context recently but I'm keen to hear some examples.
- 15457345234 3y agoBelieving that 'inflammable' means 'not flammable' (a fairly common mistake) and having a dictionary (incorrectly) confirm that is the first one that comes to mind.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoIt's already a common mistake in this world of human written dictionaries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 15457345234 3y agoCan you elaborate?
- AlecSchueler 3y agoJust that I wouldn't worry about the confusion created by a potentially hallucinated definition when having had centuries of dictionaries that carried the correct definition fail to avoid confusion in the first place. If the LLM does or doesn't give the right definition we'll still be confused because the word is inherently confusing.
- repelsteeltje 3y agoThis line of reasoning sounds like the Chinese Room argument - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room A corollary might be: Why does it matter if an intern wrote it, if the result is sensible?
- xigoi 3y agoIf the city is using taxpayers’ money to pay an externist to write laws, shouldn’t that be approved first?
- laborcontract 3y agoLocal municipalities are so poorly run that I cannot help but wonder if the mundanities of a RLHF-aligned model is at all bad for the state from a pure legislative perspective. Couple more thoughts: 1. It's not certain that what this world needs is a greater tangle of convoluted laws – ChatGPT inflating legislators' output seems like a net loss. The naive model-UN piece of me thinks that LLMs could help recontextualize political views and help lawmakers cross partisan divides. 2. LLMs are ironic in their utility in that their killer use case is summarization and, yet, they are incapable of critical reduction, ie "which laws should we get rid of?"
- esperent 3y ago> they are incapable of critical reduction, ie "which laws should we get rid of?" Why do you say that? I've had success in cases where I want to simplify an article or table of contents. I've shared it with GPT4 and said something along the lines of "this article/TOC is overly complex and I want to keep the only the most important parts. What would you suggest I remove to make this easier to read" or similar prompts. I've used this quite a lot as I've been writing tutorials recently and I tend to be too wordy/over explain things in my first drafts. The results have been pretty good, especially with detailed TOCs (i.e. a TOC of all the headings and subheadings in a long article).
- laborcontract 3y agoYou know what, you're right. They're relatively much better at critical reduction than expansion. Maybe the fact that LLMs are so good at summarization means we should attempt deploying them to trim the books.
- contravariant 3y agoIt should be obvious that they're better at reduction than expansion. At heart they remain a statistical model of language so when expanding text it cannot add information that wasn't already in there, when reducing is possible to condense or rephrase the relevant parts of the information. One of the application I use the most is phind.com which basically summarises a web search, it reliably saves some time you'd otherwise need to find the right article.
- justinclift 3y ago> Finegold said by phone on Wednesday that ChatGPT can help with some of the more tedious elements of the lawmaking process, including correctly and quickly searching and citing laws already on the books. You'd really hope they double check the results, famously unlike the legal people who didn't a few months ago to bad effect.
- Daviey 3y agoWhat matters more if the output had the intent of the author, the idea and principle, surely? Imagine 30 years ago, if it was revealed a grammar/spell-checker was used to improve a document, it would probably have had the same outrage.
- fl7305 3y agoThe first spell-checkers were great. I worked at Ericsson then. The word processor replaced every occurrence of "Ericsson" with "Erection".
- quickthrower2 3y agoSee, it can write code! I don't think this is a bad thing, at least not in 2023. It is still the tool and we are it's master.
- belugacat 3y ago“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”
- jstummbillig 3y agoIt happens simultaneously and continuously and I don't see why that would be either surprising or alarming.
- repelsteeltje 3y agoNot sure what the Brazilian bureaucracy landscape is like, but if it's anything like western Europe, I'd be wishing for tools that shape us to write less ordinance. That is: there frequently isn't a lack of ordinance, but a lack of capacity to do something meaningful with the high volume of documents. And the disconnect between paperwork and reality.
- iurisilvio 3y agoIt says more about brazilian municipalities than about chatgpt. Probably nobody read this one and many other voted documents.
- fdgjgbdfhgb 3y agoIt's a one page document that deals with a very specific situation - if a human were to write it, I'm sure they would come up with pretty much the same thing. I actually have no problems with this particular case
- fdgjgbdfhgb 3y agoOf course it's Porto Alegre lol. I was curious to see the text of the law [1], and it obviously looks fine - it's short and shows good command of "legalease". I'd love to see the prompt... [1] https://dopaonlineupload.procempa.com.br/dopaonlineupload/4979_ce_454222_1.pdf https://dopaonlineupload.procempa.com.br/dopaonlineupload/49...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]