4 ms·

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We

by piker 2mo ago

There could be benefits unlocked in legal documents by retaining a machine-readable version and distributing the obfuscated version with a legend at the top. We proposed one that said: "This document contains mitigations against review by automated systems. Recipients should ensure that they have read the contents on screen or in print. Recipients with bona fide vision impairments may be entitled to unmitigated documents upon request." In testing, obfuscating small portions of text slipped under the radar of most (then-)frontier LLMs. We used a font that was rendered on the fly and reported faulty or fake Unicode mappings: https://tritium.legal/blog/noroboto https://tritium.legal/blog/noroboto but others have proposed and done the same with ligatures.

tbalsam 2mo ago
There was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation. Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other impairment, gating it behind a request is not only cruel but gets within dangerous striking distance of an ADA lawsuit, for general applications. Maybe in the legal field or specific niche cases it's possible. But this would represent a major step backwards in the work we've done lowering barriers for a population whose only difficulty in accessing common resources is because they were born, or got sick, differently than anyone else.
- piker 2mo ago
  My dad caught paralytic Polio at age 2 and has had limited mobility his entire life, so I'm familiar with that issue. Our internal, hypothetical use-case was between contracting parties who were looking to avoid terms escaping into the wild. This shouldn't show up in standard ToS or similar. There are already really good legal reasons for that.
  - doctorpangloss 2mo ago
    okay, i get that as a lawyer who wants to make money, every client is "heckin cute and valid." and you can hypothesize that this thing is something that clients want: "terms escaping into the wild," whatever that means - are you saying that you think copying and pasting an agreement into an LLM makes its contents escape into the wild, by some mechanism? Look, I understand, you don't have to explain to me the theory for how that happens, I know it already. Since I know your a smart guy, to some extent you care about that only because you imagine that clients do. But in reality, in the real world, every email you send is read by at least two people, every contract you sign has multiple parties, etc. You make some obfuscated thing or whatever, but eventually, someone has the real text of the document - it might be YOUR client, it might be the person you are negotiating with, and you rarely represent ALL the sides. You never own ALL the information and all the parties and IT systems in totality. Eventually someone will put the text into a chatbot. Or maybe they put a salient piece of the pre-final text, like some legal theory or merely a question, into the chatbot. So I see this font stuff, or watermarking stuff, or all this provenance and control stuff, as deeply illusory. It is the worst circlejerky kind of aesthetic experience making. When you mess with anti AI fonts you are trying to compete in the same business DocuSign is in, that is, in the business of selling holistic social experiences - a whole 7000 person company whose main competition is a fucking pen - but it's not like you're doing something creative. If you care about aesthetic experiences, write a short story! Are you getting it? The itch you are scratching with this weird thing, nobody wants.
- stronglikedan 2mo ago
  > Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. That seems a bit entitled to me, especially in the story you shared. They had access to the school just like everyone else. Why does it have to be in the exact same spot? Surely they could be dropped off by the loading dock as easily as others could be dropped off out front, and maybe even moreso. Should the wheelchair accessible stall be the first stall in the bathroom so they don't have to go through "extra steps" to get to it? As long as the ramp had the proper gradation to satisfy the ADA, I don't see the problem.
  - shnock 2mo ago
    > They had access to the school just like everyone else They literally did not. They had access to the school from a different entrance than everybody else. Specifically, one intended for cargo before people.
    - fluoridation 2mo ago
      That's a different sense of "just like". Not "in the same manner", but "to the same extent".
    - binaryturtle 2mo ago
      Would it have been different, if they had everyone take the cargo entrance?
      - grim_io 2mo ago
        Yes. It's about discrimination and dehumanizing everyday cruelty.
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
        psd1 2mo ago
        I'm emotionally aligned with you, but the dehumanisation is the default state (e.g. the able are standing and the wheelchair user is below eye level), and all accommodations are a result of society dedicating resources to moving the needle away from that. It may not be sufficient, and we should criticise when it isn't sufficient, but we must in practical terms also accept tradeoffs in a scarcity economy. In the worst case, some of those tradeoffs accommodate one disability over another disability. If the dean had a swanky office and the wheelchair kid must roll past the bins, then the school made the wrong choice. But if it's a ramp at the front or textbooks, then we must think a bit harder.
gizmo686 2mo ago
It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills. Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter. You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn't just accessibility, it is things like search.
- piker 2mo ago
  Yep
aleksejs 2mo ago
You will surely not have a good time enforcing the terms of a legal document that explicitly spells out that it is intentionally obfuscated from the party it intends to bind.
- piker 2mo ago
  No, that’s not at all what is going on here.

by piker 2mo ago

tbalsam 2mo ago

There was a story once about a boy with a wheelchair who needed a ramp to get into school, and the school made him use the loading dock ramp used for garbage and other things at the back. The school argued that it was an appropriate accommodation. Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. Cerebrally, this as a solution makes sense. But if you know anyone with a vision or other impairment, gating it behind a request is not only cruel but gets within dangerous striking distance of an ADA lawsuit, for general applications. Maybe in the legal field or specific niche cases it's possible. But this would represent a major step backwards in the work we've done lowering barriers for a population whose only difficulty in accessing common resources is because they were born, or got sick, differently than anyone else.

piker 2mo ago
My dad caught paralytic Polio at age 2 and has had limited mobility his entire life, so I'm familiar with that issue. Our internal, hypothetical use-case was between contracting parties who were looking to avoid terms escaping into the wild. This shouldn't show up in standard ToS or similar. There are already really good legal reasons for that.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago
  okay, i get that as a lawyer who wants to make money, every client is "heckin cute and valid." and you can hypothesize that this thing is something that clients want: "terms escaping into the wild," whatever that means - are you saying that you think copying and pasting an agreement into an LLM makes its contents escape into the wild, by some mechanism? Look, I understand, you don't have to explain to me the theory for how that happens, I know it already. Since I know your a smart guy, to some extent you care about that only because you imagine that clients do. But in reality, in the real world, every email you send is read by at least two people, every contract you sign has multiple parties, etc. You make some obfuscated thing or whatever, but eventually, someone has the real text of the document - it might be YOUR client, it might be the person you are negotiating with, and you rarely represent ALL the sides. You never own ALL the information and all the parties and IT systems in totality. Eventually someone will put the text into a chatbot. Or maybe they put a salient piece of the pre-final text, like some legal theory or merely a question, into the chatbot. So I see this font stuff, or watermarking stuff, or all this provenance and control stuff, as deeply illusory. It is the worst circlejerky kind of aesthetic experience making. When you mess with anti AI fonts you are trying to compete in the same business DocuSign is in, that is, in the business of selling holistic social experiences - a whole 7000 person company whose main competition is a fucking pen - but it's not like you're doing something creative. If you care about aesthetic experiences, write a short story! Are you getting it? The itch you are scratching with this weird thing, nobody wants.
stronglikedan 2mo ago
> Accessibility is not accessible if you need to go through extra steps to get it. That seems a bit entitled to me, especially in the story you shared. They had access to the school just like everyone else. Why does it have to be in the exact same spot? Surely they could be dropped off by the loading dock as easily as others could be dropped off out front, and maybe even moreso. Should the wheelchair accessible stall be the first stall in the bathroom so they don't have to go through "extra steps" to get to it? As long as the ramp had the proper gradation to satisfy the ADA, I don't see the problem.
- shnock 2mo ago
  > They had access to the school just like everyone else They literally did not. They had access to the school from a different entrance than everybody else. Specifically, one intended for cargo before people.
  - fluoridation 2mo ago
    That's a different sense of "just like". Not "in the same manner", but "to the same extent".
  - binaryturtle 2mo ago
    Would it have been different, if they had everyone take the cargo entrance?
    - grim_io 2mo ago
      Yes. It's about discrimination and dehumanizing everyday cruelty.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - psd1 2mo ago
        I'm emotionally aligned with you, but the dehumanisation is the default state (e.g. the able are standing and the wheelchair user is below eye level), and all accommodations are a result of society dedicating resources to moving the needle away from that. It may not be sufficient, and we should criticise when it isn't sufficient, but we must in practical terms also accept tradeoffs in a scarcity economy. In the worst case, some of those tradeoffs accommodate one disability over another disability. If the dean had a swanky office and the wheelchair kid must roll past the bins, then the school made the wrong choice. But if it's a ramp at the front or textbooks, then we must think a bit harder.

gizmo686 2mo ago

It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills. Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter. You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn't just accessibility, it is things like search.

piker 2mo ago
Yep

aleksejs 2mo ago

You will surely not have a good time enforcing the terms of a legal document that explicitly spells out that it is intentionally obfuscated from the party it intends to bind.

piker 2mo ago
No, that’s not at all what is going on here.