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> You would also need to load an enormous amount of precedential case law Very easily done. Is that it? > lack of common sense, false conclusions The AI tool
by _akhe 2y ago
> You would also need to load an enormous amount of precedential case law
Very easily done. Is that it?
> lack of common sense, false conclusions
The AI tool doesn't replace the judge/DA/etc. it's just a very useful tool for them to use. Checkout the "RAG-based learning" section of this app I built (https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio) there's a video that shows how you can effectively load new knowledge into it (I use LlamaIndex for RAG). For example, past cases that set legal precedents, and other information you want to be considered. It creates a database of the files you load in, so it's not making those assumptions like an LLM without RAG would. I think a human would be more error-prone than an LLM with vector DB of specific data + querying engine.
> I don't see the utility
Then you are not paying attention or haven't used LLMs that much. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the kind of work it's good at.
> actual work involved in practicing law
This is what it's best at, and what people are already using RAG for: Reading patient medical docs, technical documentation, etc. this is precisely what humans are bad at and will offload to technology.
> actual research is required
You have not tried RAG.
> LLMs struggle to produce useful outputs
You have not tried RAG.
> LLMs are unlikely to identify issues
You have not tried RAG.
> the LLM by definition is creative analysis
You have not tried RAG.
You can load an entire product catalog into LlamaIndex and the LLM will have perfect knowledge of pricing, inventory, etc. This specific domain knowledge of inventory allows you to have the accurate, transactional conversations that a regular LLM isn't designed for.
- cess11 2y agoI'm not so sure human judgement is as comparable to medical terminology or technical manuals as you think it is. How did you come to this conclusion?
- _akhe 2y agoMaybe I wasn't that clear, but I did say in my original post: I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around. The doctor, the lawyer - like the software engineer - will simply be more powerful than ever and have lower overhead. The lower-down jobs will get eaten, never the knowledge work. Yet you and a few other people insist I'm saying "AI will replace human judgment" - why? I'm saying the doctor isn't replaced, the lawyer, the software engineer, etc. aren't replaced. It's more like the technician just got a better technical manual, not like they are replaced by it.
- cess11 2y agoI did not. I pointed out that you assumed a similarity between human judgement in courts to technical documentation and medical diagnostics, and asked on what grounds you make this assumption. It can't be that engineering and biology are so similar to jurisprudence, because they aren't. There has to be another reason for you to lump them together.
- _akhe 2y ago> human judgement Again the human judgment is not replaced in either scenario, I'm talking about a tool the lawyer, the doctor, etc. would use. Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info you can't afford to get wrong, unlike creative use cases for AI like image or song generation.
- cess11 2y agoNot sure why you keep bringing that up instead of answering my question. Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time.
- _akhe 2y ago> Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info Doesn't it answer it? > Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time This is a tool that helps them get it right
- cess11 2y agoNo, it does not. Why do you think technical documentation and medical diagnosis is similar to what judges in courts are doing? OK, so why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time then, if it does?
- _akhe 2y ago> No, it does not. Yeah huh. > Why do you think medical is similar to legal As stated, because both involve sensitive and personal information about people - unlike say, Stable Diffusion which is using AI for creative image creation etc. > why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time Because they're human. "Medical error" has been in the top 5 causes of death in the United States for several years. Our legal system is also far from perfect and could use the help - consider systemic biases and wrongly convicted people who spent their lives behind bars unfairly due to human error or bias, omissions of information, etc.
- freejazz 2y ago>You can load an entire product catalog into LlamaIndex and the LLM will have perfect knowledge of pricing, inventory, etc. This specific domain knowledge of inventory allows you to have the accurate, transactional conversations that a regular LLM isn't designed for. Aren't we talking about caselaw? You didn't really respond to the point, which distinguished caselaw from information like a product catalog. And rather rudely at that.
- _akhe 2y agoRudely? Ha - they misrepresented my point about RAG tooling not replacing lawyers into a straw man about replacing lawyers - I never said that, said the opposite. Secondly, it's obvious they have not used RAG, or they wouldn't say things like "inaccurate responses" etc. RAG is as accurate as any database (because it is a database). It puts all the information from your uploaded files into a database and reads from that. The commenter fundamentally misunderstands the technology and likely hasn't even used it - yet feels the need to comment on it like an expert. It's not like using ChatGPT, and in any case it's not in lieu of a lawyer anyway, that was just a straw man argument that goes counter to my actual post. I did respond to the points about accuracy and legal precedents. Unlike the other false statements that were made, these are legitimate concerns a lot of people share about whether or not LLM tooling should be used by legal professionals. Is ChatGPT sufficient to replace a lawyer? No. Is ChatGPT sufficient as a legal advice tool that a lawyer might use on a case-by-case basis or generally? No. Could the same LLM technology be used except on a body of specific case documents to surface information through a convenient language interface to a legal expert? Yes. It's as safe as SQL. The point about pricing and inventory is that, unlike an LLM, RAG involves retrieval of specific facts from a document (or collection of documents) - the language is more for handling your query and matching it to that information. None of the points he made about inaccuracies and insufficient answers, etc. or replacing lawyers apply.
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- freejazz 2y ago>Could the same LLM technology be used except on a body of specific case documents to surface information through a convenient language interface to a legal expert? Yes. It's as safe as SQL. I see no reason at all to believe this at all.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoI have tried a lot of RAG and can tell you that no LLM, including Gemini 1.5 with it's 1.5 million context, will be anywhere near as good at longer context lengths as in shorter context lengths. Appending huge numbers of tokens to the prompt often leads to the system prompt or user instructions being ignored, and since API based LLM authors are terrified of jailbreaks, they won't give you the ability to "emphasize" or "upweight" tokens (despite this being perfectly possible) since you can easily upweight a token to overwhelm the DPO alignment lobotomization that most models go through - so no easy fix for this coming from OpenAI/Anthropic et al