Rule 1 of traffic court: If the state's witness (the ticketing officer) doesn't show, defendant gets off. You do not subpoena that witness, thereby ensuring they show up.
If the AI or its handlers cannot be trusted to pregame the court appearance even remotely well then no way in hell should it be trusted with the actual trial.
You want to run this experiment? Great, lets setup a mock court with a real judge and observing lawyers and run through it. But don't waste a real court's time or some poor bastard's money by trying it in the real world first.
A reminder that "Move fast and break things" should never apply where user's life or liberty is at stake.
Would you have a source?
Mike Dunford is a practicing attorney. Embedded tweet is of a non-lawyer who screenshotted Joshua Browser DoNotPay CEO) saying the subpoena had been sent. He has since deleted those tweets as DNP backs away from this plan.
Yes, in this case, it would just be a parking ticket, but the legal system runs on precedent and it's safer to hold a strict line than to create a fuzzy "well, it depends on how much is at stake" line. If we know that ChatGPT is not equipped to give legal advice in the general case, there's no reason to allow a company to sell it as a stand-in for a lawyer.
(I would feel differently about a defendant deciding to use the free ChatGPT in this way, because they would be deliberately ignoring the warnings ChatGPT gives. It's the fact that someone decided to make selling AI legal advice into a business model that makes it troubling.)
Lawyers make heavy use of automated document sifting in e.g. e-discovery. Junior lawyers are expensive. Any tech that makes them superfluous is a boon to the partners. When we toss the village drunk from the bar, it isn’t because we’re scared they’ll drink all our booze.
You know what an attorney can't do? Disclaim malpractice liability!
It'd be wondrous if the esteemed minds of hackernews could put their brain cycles towards actually applying common sense and other things rather than jerking off to edgy narratives about disruption while completely disregarding the relevant facts to focus on what they find politically juicy ("lawyers are scared it will succeed". It's a tautological narrative you are weaving for yourself that completely skirts past all the principles underlying the legal profession and it's development over hundreds of years.
These people are being sold snake oil. Cheap snake oil, maybe, but snake oil nonetheless.
Not really. There are more lawyers than legal jobs. A lot of lawyers are toiling for well under 100k a year. People pay 1500 dollars an hour for some lawyers and 150 an hour for others due to perceived (and actual) quality differences. Adding a bunch more non-lawyers isn't going to impact the demand for the 1500 dollars an hour lawyers.
Legal work is expensive because ANY sort of bespoke professional work is expensive. Imagine if software developers had to customize their work for each customer.
And the reason lawyers are expensive is because bad legal advice usually costs far more in the long run.
But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.
They don't have to help them, but they can't act abusively by, for example, exploiting lack of procedural knowledge.
If they deliberately took advantage of one side using ChatGPT and getting it wrong because the legal foundation of knowledge isn't there for that person, that could be a breach of their duty to the court and result in professional censure or other regulatory consequences.
The prosecution wants to win, but they'd prefer to only have to win once.
If you have to go back to trial, you've already showed your hand, and the defense (who is now competent) can adapt to it.
I'm not sure if this particular case with this particular technology made sense - but I do think we need to encourage AI penetration of the legal profession, in a way that has minimal downside risk. (For defendants and plaintiffs, not lawyers.) It would be hugely beneficial for society if access to good legal advice was made extremely cheap.
Like the kid, the experiment is not to add knowledge to the world. Every adult knows touching a hot pan results in a burn. Just like everyone who understands how current LLMs work knows that it will fail at being a lawyer.
Instead the point of such an experiment is to train the experimenter. The kid learns not to touch pans on the stove.
In this case it’s not fair to metaphorically burn desperate legal defendants so that the leaders and investors in an LLM lawyer company learn their lesson. It’s the same reason we don’t let companies “experiment” with using random substances to treat cancer.