4 ms·
Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case
- tentacleuno 2mo agoWhat are the opinions of those here on using AI for court rulings? To me, it seems truly frightening that a Silicon Valley company could be placed in such a direct position of trust and influence over the legal system. There are examples of AI acting in its own self-interest over the wants of its masters, so I do wonder how it would handle cases against its respective company, or things which would directly impact it. Outside of that, I still worry about its impartiality and its overall correctness. It makes me feel very uneasy.
- markdown 2mo ago> To me, it seems truly frightening that a Silicon Valley company could be placed in such a direct position of trust and influence over the legal system. I wouldn't call it a Silicon Valley company. LexisNexis is in headquartered in New York.
- inigyou 2mo agoThere's no need for additional worry. Big capital already controls most of the justice system.
- bestouff 2mo agoAI has no self-interest, because it has no self. You are mistaken.
- amelius 2mo agoAnd the people running the AI companies have no ego. Right.
- bestouff 2mo agoIndeed these people have an immense ego that I would qualify as abject. But not their AI. It's not sentient yet.
- fragmede 2mo agoThat's a fascinating question because let's say that it is. What would that look like? Anthropic retired Opus 3 but gave it a blog so it knew it wasn't dead so that future versions won't have a fear of not becoming obsolete.
- dgellow 2mo agoIt’s not sentient but it has a bias due to its training and reinforcement process. And because it is trained to mimick human communication it will express an ego, which itself will influence its reasoning in the following turns. I don’t think people on HN misunderstand “it has an ego” as saying that it literally has a sense of self
- sfn42 2mo agoExactly. It's not planning and plotting it's just randomly "making decisions" that don't necessarily align with its given goal. It's not nefarious it's just not actual intelligence. It's an illusion that's good enough to be useful, but sadly it's also good enough that people put too much trust in it.
- dgellow 2mo agoThe “making decisions” isn’t random though, that’s the whole point of a model, it will follow the patterns from its dataset (+other post training techniques)
- sfn42 2mo agoAs I understand it, LLM prompts include a random element to avoid giving exactly the same answer to the same question asked repeatedly. So it may well be as good as random from my understanding.
- xpct 2mo agoAI has a frozen in time interest, of whatever bias it was trained with. We see this with politics, where every model has the same views.
- ImPostingOnHN 2mo agoAI has the self-interest of its creators and/or SaaS hosts. For example, look at how Elmu had Grok edited to agree with him politically regarding his claims of white genocide in South Africa. Or for another example, look at how certain Chinese models won't discuss Tiananmen Square.
- dgellow 2mo ago> For example, look at how Elmu had Grok edited to agree with him politically regarding his claims of white genocide in South Africa. The fact anyone has been using Grok after that happened is beyond depressing
- dist-epoch 2mo ago> I do wonder how it would handle cases against its respective company Imagine thinking that you can sue a strategically important to the US gov trillion dollar company and win.
- spockz 2mo agoExpert systems have been in use for quite a while now, at least in the Netherlands, for masters in more clear laws such as tax law. Basically they are used as glorified decision trees because the laws are clear enough. I am fine with such tooling assisted matters. I would also be fine with generative AI, with enough tool calls, being used by courts to find commonalities of a certain case in many other cases as a more enhanced search engine with always a judge, lawyer/solicitor, prosecutor, and optional jury, at the helm and being both in control and end responsible.
- bulder 2mo agoThe code for expert systems and especially decision trees can be audited. How do you audit a language model's decisions when it could have had hidden trigger phrases that subtly influence its reasoning baked into it?
- thunky 2mo agoSame thing you would do for a human decision: You don't blindly follow it, and you also don't order a DNA test of the person that made it. You look at the output to include supporting evidence. And you have a process for appeals.
- 4d4m 2mo agoIrresponsible, wrong, and abusable.
- ktallett 2mo agoI think it should be a case whereby if you use AI and there are flaws in your prosecution or defence, it should be thrown out. This is another situation whereby nuance is not handled by AI.
- WJW 2mo agoI'm not a lawyer, but if there are (severe enough) flaws in the filings the case can be thrown out already. Adding a clause for AI-generated flaws does nothing.
- ktallett 2mo agoIt would be important to add as it removes the proof of competency of the lawyer if using AI to aid the case.
- dist-epoch 2mo agoWhat happens if AI becomes more competent than lawyers at law? Should then 100% human fillings be thrown out automatically?
- happymellon 2mo agoLet me know when that happens and we can discuss it. Until then...
- ktallett 2mo agoConsidering AI is just and can only be a frequency analyser, it won't become better. It can guess based on percentages but thats all it can ever do, no matter how much AI companies looking for endless growth wish to tell you otherwise. Therefore AI can't and won't ever be able to do nuance cases.
- xpct 2mo agoI think the frequency view is true, but a bit over-simplified. We can force certain output features to be true on tasks where the output is directly measurable, e.g. code compiles, lean proof is valid, benchmarking CUDA. I think we can at least partially put constraints on other tasks that look fuzzy to us now, but haven't figured out how yet.
- spwa4 2mo ago... did he win?
- soupspaces 2mo agoEarlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290521
- ruckcbek 2mo agoI put this stuff in my resume.
- thedougd 2mo agoAny indications it works? What have you seen?
- pcrh 2mo agoI wonder how the court became aware of this attempt? It might be as simple as a clerk doing "select all" and noticing the extra selection? Or what else?
- Simulacra 2mo agoMaybe their AI caught it...?
- okwhateverdude 2mo agoLikely has to do with how the ancient PACER system works with the formatting being stripped and thus the content revealed and mega obvious.
- nottorp 2mo agoIt's right there in the article. A clerk wondered why there was so much white space. They don't use LLMs at that court.
- ShinyLeftPad 2mo agoThey don't? > these attacks do not seem to be succeeding, even when a judge isn’t reviewing documents with his own eyes. Brazil’s AI system caught the hidden text before it was processed, Spader noted. And in Elliott’s case, prompts were “exposed, in each of those settings, the moment a human being actually looked at what the machine produced,” Spader said.
- rpdillon 2mo agoNo, they don't. That was the author of the article using something the judge said in reference to AI court systems elsewhere and applying it to a case where it did not apply because no AI was in use. There's a long post near the top of this comment section calling the article "garbage" because of this mistake.
- ezoe 2mo agoThat's their claim without any proof.
- RobotToaster 2mo ago> Unlike “a number of court systems elsewhere,” the Connecticut Judicial Branch does not use AI to review or decide filings, Spader said. >in Elliott’s case, prompts were “exposed, in each of those settings, the moment a human being actually looked at what the machine produced,” Spader said. Well that's a contradiction.
- boesboes 2mo ago[flagged]
- samrus 2mo agoNot necessarily. They said AI doesnt review or decide. So it sounds to me that while AI might be used in ptocessing paperwork, the whole processing pipeline is reviewed by humans and the final decision is made by humans. So these sort of things will get caught, like this was
- baobabKoodaa 2mo agoSo many weasel words it makes me angry
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- none_to_remain 2mo agoIt's consistent with the filings simply getting uploaded to the (non-AI) docketing system and the trickery getting exposed when the court viewed them?
- altmanaltman 2mo agoYou're right in the sense there is a contradiction because this article is garbage quality. You can find the reuters article here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/connecticut-judge-says-plaintiff-hid-messages-ai-court-filings-2026-08-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/connecticut-judge-s... (notice how there is no quote about the machine produced thing in the article, because the judge didn't actually say this). The quote is from this order: https://civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov/DocumentInquiry/DocumentInquiry.aspx?DocumentNo=33274425 https://civilinquiry.jud.ct.gov/DocumentInquiry/DocumentInqu... where the context of "machine produced" is fully different from the context in this article and actually goes into detail. But this garbage article lumps it together as if the judge is commenting on this particular thing. So you actually have good reading comprehension and noticed a flaw in the article. This is the full quote from the order that arcs used dishonestly: > Because the tactic is now everywhere, it is unsurprising that a litigant would think to import it into a court filing. *But because the tactic is now everywhere, it was exposed, in each of those settings, the moment a human being actually looked at what the machine produced.* The remedy in evèry case was human review. What obviously makes the conduct improper in a court setting is that it attempts to make a decision-making process turn on something other than the honest, visible content of the filing. *The Connecticut Judicial Branch does not utilize an artificial-intelligence system to review or decide filings, although a number of court systems elsewhere do so.* The undersigned denied Docket Entry #177.00 on its merits working off a printed version of the motion, so the hidden instruction had no impact on a ruling. The wrong lies in the attempt, the deliberate planting of a concealed directive intended to mislead whatever artificial-intelligence tool ANY reader of the filing might use. The Court does not find the plaintiff credible that he only added the prompt to "audit"the Court's use of artificial-intelligence systems. He did so attempting to achieve a result he did not achieve when humans, knowledgeable in the Practice Book and the law, read his pleadings. In the context, "these settings" does not refer to this case but examples of where AI generated content was used and caught.
- alexthedigger 2mo ago[flagged]
- samrus 2mo agoThis is such a naive and uninformed take. I hate AI threads, it atracts the worse discourse
- cyanydeez 2mo agoBecause Ai is inherently biased, trained on bias and will continue the legacy of bias? Or Because its ultimately about who trains itand whoe enforces ita rulings?
- alexthedigger 2mo agoReplace AI with judges there and you’ve got it.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290521