If it was AI-assisted lawyer, it would be a whole different discussion. Aside from requiring a live feed of interactions to a remote system and other technical details, “lawyers using supportive tools while exercising their own judgement on behalf of their client” isn’t controversial the way marketing an automated system as, or as a substitute for, legal counsel and representation is.
Fact-checking nonsensical output would take a lot longer than researching a single body of law, which you can generally do by just looking up a recent case on the matter. You don't need to check every cite; that will have been done for you by the lawyers and judges involved in that case.
But checking every cite in an AI's output: many of those citations won't exist, and for the ones that do, you'll need to closely read all of them to confirm that they say what the AI claims they say, or are even within the ballpark of what the AI claims they say.
Of course there could be a difference between an reading all the cases an AI says are important and actually finding the important cases including ones the AI didn't point you at. However this is not what the bet was about.
Actually fact-checking an AI requires finding and reading all the precedent yourself to veryify that the AI has both cited accurately and not missed contradictory precedent that is more relevant (whether newer, from a higher court, or more specifically on-point.)
If it has got an established track record, just as with a human assistant, you can make an informed decision about what corners you can afford to cut on that, but then you aren't really fact-checking it.
OTOH, an AI properly trained on one of the existing human-curated and annotated databases linking case law to issues and tracking which cases apply, overrule, or modify holdings from others might be extremely impressive—but those are likely to be expensive products tied to existing offerings from Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc.
To the cost. If it removed the need for one legal assistant or associate then anything less than the cost of employing said person would be profit. So if it cost < 50k a year you'd be saving. (cost of employing is more than just salary)
Why would this be different with an AI assistant to help you? It's not a binary "do or do not". Just because you have an assistant doesn't mean you don't do anything. Kind of like driver assist can handle some of the load vs full self-driving.
> But checking every cite in an AI's output: many of those citations won't exist, and for the ones that do, you'll need to closely read all of them to confirm that they say what the AI claims they say, or are even within the ballpark of what the AI claims they say.
But you'd have to do this anyway if you did all the research yourself. At least the AI assistant can help give you some good leads so you don't have to start from scratch. A lazy lawyer could skip some verifying, but a good lawyer would still benefit from an AI assistant as was my original bet, just like they would benefit from interns or paralegals, etc. And all those interns and paralegals could still be there, helping verify facts.
No, that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. If you did the research yourself, you wouldn't need to verify every cite once you find a relevant source/cite, because previous lawyers would have already validated the citations contained within that source. (A good lawyer should validate at least some of those cites, but frequently that's not necessary unless you're dealing with big stakes.)
And the AI assistant, at least this one and the ones based on ChatGPT, don't provide good leads. They provide crap leads that not only don't exist, but increase the amount of work. And any "AI" based on LLM will never be capable of providing good cites, because they'll never understand what they're reading and/or citing, and they'll miss relevant citations that are not statistically likely (i.e., new case law, or cases with similar facts, or similar law, or otherwise similar contexts that can be applied to the case at hand) that a context-aware AI or living breathing human would find easily.
At best, LLM-based AI might be able to help people with very simple legal situations. But you don't need AI for that. A single decision tree is easier to implement, and it's even easier to verify the domain-specific process and outcomes to make sure you don't get something silly like happened with this "AI".
IANAL, but I would bet the level of effort to fact check an AI's output would be orders of magnitude lower than researching and building all your own facts.
I used it to generate some ffmpeg commands. I had to verify all the flags myself, but it was like 5 minutes of work compared to probably hours it would have taken me to figure them all out on my own.