7 ms·

Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

127 points by RickJWagner 2y ago

achow 2y ago
https://archive.is/uTgE6 https://archive.is/uTgE6
neverminder 2y ago
It would be interesting to see AI lawyer arguing a case in court.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Some of the early lawyerly uses of AI have been no bueno.[0] Yet the legal need to produce knowledge from huge amounts of text is such an obvious alignment with LLMs... [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/canada-lawyer-chatgpt-fake-cases-ai https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/canada-lawyer-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/nyregion/avianca-airline-lawsuit-chatgpt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/nyregion/avianca-airline-... https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222273745/michael-cohen-ai-fake-legal-cases https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222273745/michael-cohen-ai-f...
  - loufe 2y ago
    I think most everyone would agree that using early LLMs (and personally I'd still consider current LLMs to be early) in legal contexts is ill-advised, at best. Circle back to this question in 5 years and I think the response will be very different.
mrangle 2y ago
I don't know a lot, but I do know that the legal profession will change itself as required to protect itself. Which includes protecting itself from being completely intolerable to the wider populace. This is a law of the Universe on par with the "death and taxes" adage. What this may look like is measures that will make legal action, and even public action on par with "comments", far less accessible. At least to robots. Though, I can't predict how that will look in terms of detail.
- qup 2y ago
  This looks like more work/income for the legal profession, not less work. The whole article is about how with minimal effort you can cost companies and individuals beaucoup bucks in legal expenses.
  - mrangle 2y ago
    Your two statements logically conflict. I understand the article. Your first line is not what it says. See the "Legal Cost Collapse" subhead. In addition, logically LLM's will increasingly allow individuals to free themselves from the need for attorneys. And again, see the Cyber Risk subhead for issues implying an intolerable state of affairs for the wider public. In that light as well as other context, your second line will be a major part of the subtext for why the legal environment adapts away from LLM access.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      > logically LLM's will increasingly allow individuals to free themselves from the need for attorneys. No. Not a chance. If you sue me with LLM-generated filings, I’m going to be paying a lawyer to mercilessly win, using LLMs as needed (perhaps using LLMs to test various responses to your filings that cause your LLM to spit out something that is terrible for you but you’d have no idea since you aren’t using a lawyer).
      - mrangle 2y ago
        Legal access and the viability of the human-staffed legal profession aren't just about litigation. Moreover, your and everyone else's respective ability to continue to counter lawsuits is severely limited by how much cash you and they have. Change is on the way, even if it mostly ends with radical defensive restructuring on the part of the law and legal profession.
- newyankee 2y ago
  You should sometimes review the Indian judicial system and their judgements. I have never seen a more self congratulatory, smug and confident yet incompetent people in my life. All hiding under some pretense of intellectual superiority that is enabled by a corrupt collegium system that makes it difficult to disrupt. Essentially run by a handful of families and inner circle. Just another shadow govt. type entity.
seydor 2y ago
Between the lines it seems the legal professions depend on strong barriers to entry to justify their high prices, and this is threatening them more than the companies.
- newyankee 2y ago
  The barriers essentially are 'we know better' which is weird as I feel it is subjectivity and biases that enable them. There is a good case for making 90% of court cases as objective as possible by rewriting from scratch, but that can never happen in this world.
- beej71 2y ago
  Here's a story from my divorce 25 years ago. We were having an easy divorce, and so we used Nolo press to get it done. But it was difficult to know what forms actually had to be filed in our case. So we went to the clerk, and said, out of all these forms, which ones do we have to file? And the clerk said that they couldn't tell us because that would be offering legal advice. The lawyers had gotten laws passed preventing the clerk from telling us what forms we needed to give the clerk. Nice. After a couple of minutes of thought, we decided to just fill them all out. So we filled out everything and handed it to the clerk. The clerk then proceeded to cherry pick the forms they needed, and handed the rest back to us. ("My sole regret is that I have but one face to palm for my country.") I think in the last 25 years, it's probably only gotten a lot worse.
  - busyant 2y ago
    Another (non-divorce) story. * My wife and I own several rental properties. * The properties are in an LLC that we formed. * I went to local housing court to file papers for an eviction (non-payment of rent). * I hand the paperwork to the clerk and the clerk says, "I need your ID to determine that you actually own the property ..." * Me: "Actually, my name won't be listed. It'll be listed under the name of our LLC." * Clerk: "Then you can't file the eviction yourself. You have to be represented by a lawyer." * Me: "???? Can't I just prove that I'm an officer of the LLC?" * Clerk: "No. If it's not directly owned by you, you need a lawyer to proceed with the eviction." * Me: "But I can represent the LLC in every other capacity that I can think of. You're telling me that I can't do this on my own?" * Clerk: "I don't make the rules ..." $1500 later, I have to keep my lawyer on task to file the paperwork. <grumble>
coding123 2y ago
Lawsuits may become automatic when you leave a store unhappy it might have the ability to create a lawsuit and then the store's lawsuit Api will be called, then the two ais will start negotiations and end up with a $15 deposit in your account by the time you get home. And it will be all because a certain hormone raised in your head.
- notamy 2y ago
  Good lord, I hope not. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
- kgwgk 2y ago
  > $15 deposit in your account A transfer on the blockchain, you mean.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    They meant 1 kg of standard breakfast bread's worth of tokens in whatever cryptocurrency.
simonw 2y ago
This looks like yet another example of the thing where LLMs disrupt processes which are designed to limit engagement through requiring tedious long-form writing using jargon that is not available to most people. On the one hand this is great - real “democratization” of how society works. But it’s going to break a whole lot of things in the short term while these processes are redesigned for this new world. And the fixes will likely be to come up with new ways of limiting the number of people who can engage.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  Legal filings don't require special jargon. Most lawyers just use jargon because they know exactly what the jargon means and how a judge will interpret it. In a lot of cases, they use the jargon simply because its what they learned in law school from professors who learned it from professors who learned it from professors who learned it when the jargon was still required. A layperson can file their own lawsuit, and as long as they satisfy the requirements of the law outlining the necessary elements of the lawsuit, they don't need any jargon or special language. (Formatting is a court-imposed requirement; that does not come from the lawyers.) Access to the courts is limited by imposing filing fees. An LLM like this won't change that; if anything the most likely response is to increase filing fees.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
> They use an AI tool to comb public information about your company and file hundreds of copyright infringement, IP, and trade secret theft cases. The scale means you can’t just ignore it or settle for a nominal amount. The "scale" itself is the problem. Because companies are so huge, and their reach is so huge, it invites techniques that increase the efficiency of attacks. Human beings weren't meant to handle things at such scales, and that is part of the reason we have the problem of AI in the first place. If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. AI is the natural reaction of a large populace who look for a technological solution to the immense chaos of information.
- munchler 2y ago
  > If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. Yes, because they’d be too busy worrying about food and disease to bother with much else. Agrarian societies weren’t fun.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > Agrarian societies weren’t fun. I suppose you've lived in one? Or are you just fearmongering? Because agrarian societies certainly weren't always worrying about food and disease. What about the Amish? They certainly manage decently without too much technology.
- barrkel 2y ago
  Self-sufficiency is poverty.
- visarga 2y ago
  > If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. You could say AI is the child of internet, as it was the internet that cooked up the massive trillion token datasets. Without internet, no AI. But if you look closely, internet resembles AI - you can search for images instead of generating, there are billions you can choose from. You can search for information and you can chat on social networks instead of using a LLM. It's the same with AI but even better, human made. An HGI made of humans and networks.
theptip 2y ago
Compute is going to be king in the new world; if you have enough GPUs you can spam legal challenges. If you have more GPUs you can deploy those to take the other side and defend. As with DoS, the interesting cases will be where an asymmetry exists in cost of request vs response (or amplification is possible). In the short term it seems likely that the government will be on the losing side of this exchange.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Depending on jurisdiction, courts might require money - so those might become more favored by people and companies to be in.
  - theptip 2y ago
    You can turn GPUs into cash flow but the reverse isn’t guaranteed to be true.
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      Need a lot more cashflow than just to run the GPUs in some places if you file a lot of cases with the courts - and that is way before hypothetically winning anything that might help recover them.
ryandrake 2y ago
If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.
- dartos 2y ago
  > everything under the sun was actionable Not everything (in the US at least) is actionable, but you still need someone to review each suit and determine whether or not to throw it out.
  - campbel 2y ago
    seems reasonable to add an initial cost burden to the filer then, to pay for the review, especially if they are filing a lot of suits. Say first 10 suits per year are free, but then you need to get on the premium plan :D
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      No that just tips the playing field back in favor of the larger players who can afford the fees.
    - ronsor 2y ago
      You already have to pay fees to file a lawsuit.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      If the goal is to disincentivize all people from making frivolous lawsuits, that cost burden sharing should probably be proportional to the person’s free resources somehow. A percentage of wealth or income or something like that.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    AI can do that too.
mrtksn 2y ago
Wouldn't this make legal counter-action cheap too? The robots fighting each other with a human referee(for now), the winner gets bounty. On a more serious note though, people not seeking justice due to complexity which leads to high costs is the real issue IMHO. Maybe the idea is that this is pushing people into finding a middle ground but it's also a known barrier to real justice. So some years ago when Turkey wasn't as totalitarian as today but was on the way to become such, they started having a problems with the European Court of Human Rights. The cases begin to pile up. EU proposed: Create a way for people to access the Constitutional court of Turkey, so you might resolve most of the issues before coming to us as. Turkey's proposal: Why don't you introduce a considerable application fee, so the number of cases can drop dramatically because only a few can afford it? So yeah, that was the Turkish style. The EU way prevailed but this time Turkey dropped its bid to join EU and it simply started ignoring it's own Constitutional Court decisions. I think the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter that much because people will end up doing it their own way.
- lupire 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    It sounds like it's about to get symmetric, isn't it? More GPU's are unlikely to yield better outcomes once some threshold is reached just as more and better designed restaurant discovery apps won't make you discover better restaurants in your area if they are non-existent.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The laws as written only work because they're not applied perfectly and to every offence. My standard examples of this are that there's around three times as many heroin users in the UK as that country's total prison population, and that perfect enforcement of road traffic regulations would mean the only people allowed to drive would be people like me who don't have a car. I hope that things like this result in massive liberalisation of legal systems worldwide; the alternative, de facto not de jure*, is one law for the rich and another for the poor. * "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France
dmvdoug 2y ago
Founders of “legal AI” startup say legal AI will change everything (get in while you can!). Each 100 shares purchased comes with your very own carbolic smoke ball. Don’t delay!
- avidiax 2y ago
  Not clear the relevance to the article, but I suppose people using GenAI for contracts need to be cautious, since they will be bound by whatever the AI comes up with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    The whole article was ridiculous puffery for the application of AI in the legal field, written by… people who would benefit from investment in application of AI in the legal field. The beginning of the article is supposed to hook you in and provide you some plausible basis for what follows. Yet, they chose to go with AI generating comments on proposed regulations. I’m not going to spend any time going into why that’s ridiculous, so feel free to write me off as a nutter or whatever, but the idea of that submitting a comment to a regulatory agency during a public comment will suddenly transform law and legal practice is about the weakest possible case to make. Public comments aren’t legal materials, they’re comments from the public. And I’ll bet you a year worth of salary that as people start flooding regulatory agencies with genAI produced public comments, a rule will appear (whether through regulation or through judicial interpretation) that agencies need not respond to nor even consider public comments submitted without some kind of declaration that it was not produced using genAI.
pylua 2y ago
This is actually insane. 120,000 comments! To a certain extent if our law is already so complicated that you need to hire a lawyer to understand it that is already a fundamental problem. Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about. The computers should be able to determine if someone is breaking a law, not trying to check if it is a bad law. We should be using computing power where someone can ask: is this legal ? Can I do this? That’s the true value to society.
- romanovcode 2y ago
  Most laws have a lot of neuances and edge-cases. That's why the words and language is so important. The more edge-cases are discovered the more complicated the text becomes. I don't think you can easily simplify it tbh.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    That’s not really true though. While legalese creates complexity a substantial part of judicial rulings is figuring out which of it should be ignored because it’s bullshit. A lot of law is driven by arguments of how things ought to be given a loose framework of law and precedent.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  This kind of comes back to the common law vs civil law system. Most English-speaking countries operate under a common law system where the laws as written down provide the ground work, but precedent set by previous court cases is also legally binding. In contrast most of Europe and South America operates under a civil law system (yes, terrible name, not the opposite of criminal law) where the written law reigns supreme and previous court decisions are merely informing opinions. As you can imagine, algorithmic decisions are incredibly difficult in any common law system. And while they might be viable in a civil law system, you would lose out on the ability of a judge to give consideration to the specific circumstances of each case. In practise both systems end up unwieldy in an attempt to be fair. Common law systems because of the overwhelming amount of precedent to consider, civil law systems because the laws become incredibly long and complex, with complex interactions between laws
milansuk 2y ago
Higher volume legal actions can only be successful as "peer-to-peer". If it goes through a courtroom, there is no way they can handle this kind of volume(even with AI tools). Imagine that the CEO is informed there are 20 new legal actions and the first court hearing will start 10-20 years from now when the CEO will not be part of the company anymore.
visarga 2y ago
I often read comments where people doubt there will be much work left after AGI. I think on the contrary, it will keep us busy, even busier than before. The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Will lawyers lose their jobs? Looks like the opposite trend is happening. With each capability unlocked, we got more work not less. Remember that reminder about the fate of horses after the automobile was invented? How about the fate the transportation jobs? In 1910, approximately 13% of the workforce (about 6.7 million people) were involved in transportation-related employment. By 2023, this percentage decreased to 10.3%, but the absolute number grew to around 21.3 million people due to population growth.
- animal_spirits 2y ago
  I share this view too, especially about law. There is going to be a huge increase in demand for white collar work, but the problem we will face is that the skills required to supply this demand will go up, and there further will be demand for technology to lower the skill barrier to do the jobs. I think the paper to CAD transition is a perfect example. We started with more demand for computer skills to increase manufacturing efficiency, and now there is increasingly cheaper and better software to lower the barrier to learning CAD I envision a similar transition for law and justice.
- carapace 2y ago
  > The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. - - - - Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate." The explosion of AI means that humans are getting more valuable, but only for doing things that only humans (not AI) can do.
  - ipython 2y ago
    What’s interesting in that statement is that modern llms are largely built off… reinforcement learning from low paid humans.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. It's probably related to the nature of human desire.
lnxg33k1 2y ago
It could be great if law finally would become equal to everyone and not only for those who can afford it
kriro 2y ago
AI trained on infringing material being used to help sue over such material. Pretty funny.
croes 2y ago
So that's some kind of Juridical DDoS attack. I can see how AI is helping to improve humanity's existence.
farceSpherule 2y ago
If we had something similar to the "English rule", litigation in this country would decrease drastically. The English rule provides that the party that loses in court pays the other party's legal costs.
- klodolph 2y ago
  Right, and if we put everybody in work camps, unemployment would drop. It’s easy to improve a single metric (like “amount of litigation”) if you don’t care about any of the other effects it would have.
- acdha 2y ago
  That would be a godsend for large companies who can let the likelihood of being bankrupted by legal fees deter most lawsuits.
dogmayor 2y ago
This makes little sense. Commenting on a proposed rule and filing a lawsuit are two entirely different tasks and two entirely different processes. That people were able to submit more comments and do so in an easier manner says nothing about broader "legal risk" to corporations. And as you can see, the authors are co-founders of some related startup and this article is nothing more than a weak pitch.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
The summary seems to be; That you can't obfuscate with words like you used to and normal bureaucratic hurdles are less effective with LLM generators? Depending on how badly these things get the summaries wrong it could certainly help with people trying to understand what their government is doing. I'd love to be able to download the contents of a bill from the Federal Register and have an accurate summary of all of the things it changes and how.

127 points by RickJWagner 2y ago

achow 2y ago

https://archive.is/uTgE6 https://archive.is/uTgE6

neverminder 2y ago

It would be interesting to see AI lawyer arguing a case in court.

lelandfe 2y ago
Some of the early lawyerly uses of AI have been no bueno.[0] Yet the legal need to produce knowledge from huge amounts of text is such an obvious alignment with LLMs... [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/canada-lawyer-chatgpt-fake-cases-ai https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/canada-lawyer-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/nyregion/avianca-airline-lawsuit-chatgpt.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/nyregion/avianca-airline-... https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222273745/michael-cohen-ai-fake-legal-cases https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222273745/michael-cohen-ai-f...
- loufe 2y ago
  I think most everyone would agree that using early LLMs (and personally I'd still consider current LLMs to be early) in legal contexts is ill-advised, at best. Circle back to this question in 5 years and I think the response will be very different.

mrangle 2y ago

I don't know a lot, but I do know that the legal profession will change itself as required to protect itself. Which includes protecting itself from being completely intolerable to the wider populace. This is a law of the Universe on par with the "death and taxes" adage. What this may look like is measures that will make legal action, and even public action on par with "comments", far less accessible. At least to robots. Though, I can't predict how that will look in terms of detail.

qup 2y ago
This looks like more work/income for the legal profession, not less work. The whole article is about how with minimal effort you can cost companies and individuals beaucoup bucks in legal expenses.
- mrangle 2y ago
  Your two statements logically conflict. I understand the article. Your first line is not what it says. See the "Legal Cost Collapse" subhead. In addition, logically LLM's will increasingly allow individuals to free themselves from the need for attorneys. And again, see the Cyber Risk subhead for issues implying an intolerable state of affairs for the wider public. In that light as well as other context, your second line will be a major part of the subtext for why the legal environment adapts away from LLM access.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    > logically LLM's will increasingly allow individuals to free themselves from the need for attorneys. No. Not a chance. If you sue me with LLM-generated filings, I’m going to be paying a lawyer to mercilessly win, using LLMs as needed (perhaps using LLMs to test various responses to your filings that cause your LLM to spit out something that is terrible for you but you’d have no idea since you aren’t using a lawyer).
    - mrangle 2y ago
      Legal access and the viability of the human-staffed legal profession aren't just about litigation. Moreover, your and everyone else's respective ability to continue to counter lawsuits is severely limited by how much cash you and they have. Change is on the way, even if it mostly ends with radical defensive restructuring on the part of the law and legal profession.
newyankee 2y ago
You should sometimes review the Indian judicial system and their judgements. I have never seen a more self congratulatory, smug and confident yet incompetent people in my life. All hiding under some pretense of intellectual superiority that is enabled by a corrupt collegium system that makes it difficult to disrupt. Essentially run by a handful of families and inner circle. Just another shadow govt. type entity.

seydor 2y ago

Between the lines it seems the legal professions depend on strong barriers to entry to justify their high prices, and this is threatening them more than the companies.

newyankee 2y ago
The barriers essentially are 'we know better' which is weird as I feel it is subjectivity and biases that enable them. There is a good case for making 90% of court cases as objective as possible by rewriting from scratch, but that can never happen in this world.
beej71 2y ago
Here's a story from my divorce 25 years ago. We were having an easy divorce, and so we used Nolo press to get it done. But it was difficult to know what forms actually had to be filed in our case. So we went to the clerk, and said, out of all these forms, which ones do we have to file? And the clerk said that they couldn't tell us because that would be offering legal advice. The lawyers had gotten laws passed preventing the clerk from telling us what forms we needed to give the clerk. Nice. After a couple of minutes of thought, we decided to just fill them all out. So we filled out everything and handed it to the clerk. The clerk then proceeded to cherry pick the forms they needed, and handed the rest back to us. ("My sole regret is that I have but one face to palm for my country.") I think in the last 25 years, it's probably only gotten a lot worse.
- busyant 2y ago
  Another (non-divorce) story. * My wife and I own several rental properties. * The properties are in an LLC that we formed. * I went to local housing court to file papers for an eviction (non-payment of rent). * I hand the paperwork to the clerk and the clerk says, "I need your ID to determine that you actually own the property ..." * Me: "Actually, my name won't be listed. It'll be listed under the name of our LLC." * Clerk: "Then you can't file the eviction yourself. You have to be represented by a lawyer." * Me: "???? Can't I just prove that I'm an officer of the LLC?" * Clerk: "No. If it's not directly owned by you, you need a lawyer to proceed with the eviction." * Me: "But I can represent the LLC in every other capacity that I can think of. You're telling me that I can't do this on my own?" * Clerk: "I don't make the rules ..." $1500 later, I have to keep my lawyer on task to file the paperwork. <grumble>

coding123 2y ago

Lawsuits may become automatic when you leave a store unhappy it might have the ability to create a lawsuit and then the store's lawsuit Api will be called, then the two ais will start negotiations and end up with a $15 deposit in your account by the time you get home. And it will be all because a certain hormone raised in your head.

notamy 2y ago
Good lord, I hope not. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
kgwgk 2y ago
> $15 deposit in your account A transfer on the blockchain, you mean.
- anticensor 2y ago
  They meant 1 kg of standard breakfast bread's worth of tokens in whatever cryptocurrency.

simonw 2y ago

This looks like yet another example of the thing where LLMs disrupt processes which are designed to limit engagement through requiring tedious long-form writing using jargon that is not available to most people. On the one hand this is great - real “democratization” of how society works. But it’s going to break a whole lot of things in the short term while these processes are redesigned for this new world. And the fixes will likely be to come up with new ways of limiting the number of people who can engage.

gamblor956 2y ago
Legal filings don't require special jargon. Most lawyers just use jargon because they know exactly what the jargon means and how a judge will interpret it. In a lot of cases, they use the jargon simply because its what they learned in law school from professors who learned it from professors who learned it from professors who learned it when the jargon was still required. A layperson can file their own lawsuit, and as long as they satisfy the requirements of the law outlining the necessary elements of the lawsuit, they don't need any jargon or special language. (Formatting is a court-imposed requirement; that does not come from the lawyers.) Access to the courts is limited by imposing filing fees. An LLM like this won't change that; if anything the most likely response is to increase filing fees.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

> They use an AI tool to comb public information about your company and file hundreds of copyright infringement, IP, and trade secret theft cases. The scale means you can’t just ignore it or settle for a nominal amount. The "scale" itself is the problem. Because companies are so huge, and their reach is so huge, it invites techniques that increase the efficiency of attacks. Human beings weren't meant to handle things at such scales, and that is part of the reason we have the problem of AI in the first place. If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. AI is the natural reaction of a large populace who look for a technological solution to the immense chaos of information.

munchler 2y ago
> If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. Yes, because they’d be too busy worrying about food and disease to bother with much else. Agrarian societies weren’t fun.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > Agrarian societies weren’t fun. I suppose you've lived in one? Or are you just fearmongering? Because agrarian societies certainly weren't always worrying about food and disease. What about the Amish? They certainly manage decently without too much technology.
barrkel 2y ago
Self-sufficiency is poverty.
visarga 2y ago
> If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. You could say AI is the child of internet, as it was the internet that cooked up the massive trillion token datasets. Without internet, no AI. But if you look closely, internet resembles AI - you can search for images instead of generating, there are billions you can choose from. You can search for information and you can chat on social networks instead of using a LLM. It's the same with AI but even better, human made. An HGI made of humans and networks.

theptip 2y ago

Compute is going to be king in the new world; if you have enough GPUs you can spam legal challenges. If you have more GPUs you can deploy those to take the other side and defend. As with DoS, the interesting cases will be where an asymmetry exists in cost of request vs response (or amplification is possible). In the short term it seems likely that the government will be on the losing side of this exchange.

RandomLensman 2y ago
Depending on jurisdiction, courts might require money - so those might become more favored by people and companies to be in.
- theptip 2y ago
  You can turn GPUs into cash flow but the reverse isn’t guaranteed to be true.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    Need a lot more cashflow than just to run the GPUs in some places if you file a lot of cases with the courts - and that is way before hypothetically winning anything that might help recover them.

ryandrake 2y ago

If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.

dartos 2y ago
> everything under the sun was actionable Not everything (in the US at least) is actionable, but you still need someone to review each suit and determine whether or not to throw it out.
- campbel 2y ago
  seems reasonable to add an initial cost burden to the filer then, to pay for the review, especially if they are filing a lot of suits. Say first 10 suits per year are free, but then you need to get on the premium plan :D
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    No that just tips the playing field back in favor of the larger players who can afford the fees.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    You already have to pay fees to file a lawsuit.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    If the goal is to disincentivize all people from making frivolous lawsuits, that cost burden sharing should probably be proportional to the person’s free resources somehow. A percentage of wealth or income or something like that.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  AI can do that too.

mrtksn 2y ago

Wouldn't this make legal counter-action cheap too? The robots fighting each other with a human referee(for now), the winner gets bounty. On a more serious note though, people not seeking justice due to complexity which leads to high costs is the real issue IMHO. Maybe the idea is that this is pushing people into finding a middle ground but it's also a known barrier to real justice. So some years ago when Turkey wasn't as totalitarian as today but was on the way to become such, they started having a problems with the European Court of Human Rights. The cases begin to pile up. EU proposed: Create a way for people to access the Constitutional court of Turkey, so you might resolve most of the issues before coming to us as. Turkey's proposal: Why don't you introduce a considerable application fee, so the number of cases can drop dramatically because only a few can afford it? So yeah, that was the Turkish style. The EU way prevailed but this time Turkey dropped its bid to join EU and it simply started ignoring it's own Constitutional Court decisions. I think the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter that much because people will end up doing it their own way.

lupire 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
- mrtksn 2y ago
  It sounds like it's about to get symmetric, isn't it? More GPU's are unlikely to yield better outcomes once some threshold is reached just as more and better designed restaurant discovery apps won't make you discover better restaurants in your area if they are non-existent.
ben_w 2y ago
The laws as written only work because they're not applied perfectly and to every offence. My standard examples of this are that there's around three times as many heroin users in the UK as that country's total prison population, and that perfect enforcement of road traffic regulations would mean the only people allowed to drive would be people like me who don't have a car. I hope that things like this result in massive liberalisation of legal systems worldwide; the alternative, de facto not de jure*, is one law for the rich and another for the poor. * "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France

dmvdoug 2y ago

Founders of “legal AI” startup say legal AI will change everything (get in while you can!). Each 100 shares purchased comes with your very own carbolic smoke ball. Don’t delay!

avidiax 2y ago
Not clear the relevance to the article, but I suppose people using GenAI for contracts need to be cautious, since they will be bound by whatever the AI comes up with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  The whole article was ridiculous puffery for the application of AI in the legal field, written by… people who would benefit from investment in application of AI in the legal field. The beginning of the article is supposed to hook you in and provide you some plausible basis for what follows. Yet, they chose to go with AI generating comments on proposed regulations. I’m not going to spend any time going into why that’s ridiculous, so feel free to write me off as a nutter or whatever, but the idea of that submitting a comment to a regulatory agency during a public comment will suddenly transform law and legal practice is about the weakest possible case to make. Public comments aren’t legal materials, they’re comments from the public. And I’ll bet you a year worth of salary that as people start flooding regulatory agencies with genAI produced public comments, a rule will appear (whether through regulation or through judicial interpretation) that agencies need not respond to nor even consider public comments submitted without some kind of declaration that it was not produced using genAI.

pylua 2y ago

This is actually insane. 120,000 comments! To a certain extent if our law is already so complicated that you need to hire a lawyer to understand it that is already a fundamental problem. Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about. The computers should be able to determine if someone is breaking a law, not trying to check if it is a bad law. We should be using computing power where someone can ask: is this legal ? Can I do this? That’s the true value to society.

romanovcode 2y ago
Most laws have a lot of neuances and edge-cases. That's why the words and language is so important. The more edge-cases are discovered the more complicated the text becomes. I don't think you can easily simplify it tbh.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  That’s not really true though. While legalese creates complexity a substantial part of judicial rulings is figuring out which of it should be ignored because it’s bullshit. A lot of law is driven by arguments of how things ought to be given a loose framework of law and precedent.
wongarsu 2y ago
This kind of comes back to the common law vs civil law system. Most English-speaking countries operate under a common law system where the laws as written down provide the ground work, but precedent set by previous court cases is also legally binding. In contrast most of Europe and South America operates under a civil law system (yes, terrible name, not the opposite of criminal law) where the written law reigns supreme and previous court decisions are merely informing opinions. As you can imagine, algorithmic decisions are incredibly difficult in any common law system. And while they might be viable in a civil law system, you would lose out on the ability of a judge to give consideration to the specific circumstances of each case. In practise both systems end up unwieldy in an attempt to be fair. Common law systems because of the overwhelming amount of precedent to consider, civil law systems because the laws become incredibly long and complex, with complex interactions between laws

milansuk 2y ago

Higher volume legal actions can only be successful as "peer-to-peer". If it goes through a courtroom, there is no way they can handle this kind of volume(even with AI tools). Imagine that the CEO is informed there are 20 new legal actions and the first court hearing will start 10-20 years from now when the CEO will not be part of the company anymore.

visarga 2y ago

I often read comments where people doubt there will be much work left after AGI. I think on the contrary, it will keep us busy, even busier than before. The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Will lawyers lose their jobs? Looks like the opposite trend is happening. With each capability unlocked, we got more work not less. Remember that reminder about the fate of horses after the automobile was invented? How about the fate the transportation jobs? In 1910, approximately 13% of the workforce (about 6.7 million people) were involved in transportation-related employment. By 2023, this percentage decreased to 10.3%, but the absolute number grew to around 21.3 million people due to population growth.

animal_spirits 2y ago
I share this view too, especially about law. There is going to be a huge increase in demand for white collar work, but the problem we will face is that the skills required to supply this demand will go up, and there further will be demand for technology to lower the skill barrier to do the jobs. I think the paper to CAD transition is a perfect example. We started with more demand for computer skills to increase manufacturing efficiency, and now there is increasingly cheaper and better software to lower the barrier to learning CAD I envision a similar transition for law and justice.
carapace 2y ago
> The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. - - - - Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate." The explosion of AI means that humans are getting more valuable, but only for doing things that only humans (not AI) can do.
- ipython 2y ago
  What’s interesting in that statement is that modern llms are largely built off… reinforcement learning from low paid humans.
- visarga 2y ago
  > Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. It's probably related to the nature of human desire.

lnxg33k1 2y ago

It could be great if law finally would become equal to everyone and not only for those who can afford it

kriro 2y ago

AI trained on infringing material being used to help sue over such material. Pretty funny.

croes 2y ago

So that's some kind of Juridical DDoS attack. I can see how AI is helping to improve humanity's existence.

farceSpherule 2y ago

If we had something similar to the "English rule", litigation in this country would decrease drastically. The English rule provides that the party that loses in court pays the other party's legal costs.

klodolph 2y ago
Right, and if we put everybody in work camps, unemployment would drop. It’s easy to improve a single metric (like “amount of litigation”) if you don’t care about any of the other effects it would have.
acdha 2y ago
That would be a godsend for large companies who can let the likelihood of being bankrupted by legal fees deter most lawsuits.

dogmayor 2y ago

This makes little sense. Commenting on a proposed rule and filing a lawsuit are two entirely different tasks and two entirely different processes. That people were able to submit more comments and do so in an easier manner says nothing about broader "legal risk" to corporations. And as you can see, the authors are co-founders of some related startup and this article is nothing more than a weak pitch.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

The summary seems to be; That you can't obfuscate with words like you used to and normal bureaucratic hurdles are less effective with LLM generators? Depending on how badly these things get the summaries wrong it could certainly help with people trying to understand what their government is doing. I'd love to be able to download the contents of a bill from the Federal Register and have an accurate summary of all of the things it changes and how.