As far as I'm aware, no LLM has reached sentience and started taking on projects of its own volition. So it's easy - you sanction whoever ran the software for an illegal purpose or whoever marketed and sold the software for an illegal purpose.

https://apnews.com/article/sandy-hook-school-shooting-reming...

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/07/12/new-california-law-holds-g...

The second link feeling much closer to direct government action.

I'd prefer that the boilerplate actually be reduced instead, but... I don't have any issue with someone using AI to target tasks that are essentially copy-paste operations anyway. I think this was kind of different.

> If an AI is doing something illegal like practicing law, how does one sanction an AI?

IANAL, but AIs don't have legal personhood, so it would be kind of like trying to sanction a hammer. I don't think that the AI was being threatened with legal action over this stunt, DoNotPay was being threatened.

In an instance where an AI just exists and is Open Source and there is no party at fault beyond the person who decides to download and use it, then as long as that person isn't violating court procedure there's probably no one to sanction? It's likely a bad move, but :shrug:.

But this comes into play with stuff like self-driving as well. The law doesn't think of AI as something that's special. If your AI drives you into the side of the wall, it's the same situation as if your back-up camera didn't beep and you backed into another car. Either the manufacturer is at fault because the tool failed, or you're at fault and you didn't have a reasonable expectation that the tool wouldn't fail or you used it improperly. Or maybe nobody's at fault because everyone (both you and the manufacturer) acted reasonably. In all of those cases, the AI doesn't have any more legal rights or masking of liability than your break pads do, it's not treated as a unique entity -- and using an AI doesn't change a manufacturer's liability around advertising.

That gets slightly more complicated with copyright law surrounding AIs, but even there, it's not that AIs are special entities that have their own legal status that can't own copyright, it's that (currently, we'll see if that precedent holds in the future) US courts rule that using an AI is not a sufficiently creative act to generate copyright protections.

Law is different because the bar has a legally enforced monopoly on doing legal work.

DoNotPay was being threatened. But they weren't practicing law - they were just providing legal tools.

My point is that were in uncharted legal territory. Perhaps ask the AI what it thinks ;)

I don't see how this would decrease DoNotPay's liability.

Regardless of how you feel about the bar, I don't think that changes anything about who they would sanction or why. Having a legal monopoly means they're even less likely to go along with a "the AI did it, not me" explanation than a normal market would be.

I mean, no matter what, they're not sanctioning the AI. They don't recognize the AI as a person, they recognize it as a tool that a person/organization is using to perform an action.

"Personhood" in a legal sense doesn't necessarily mean a natural person. In this case, the company behind it is a person and is practicing law (so no pro se litigant using the company to generate legal arguments). In addition, if you want something entered into court, you need a (natural person) lawyer to do it, who has a binding ethical duty to supervise the work of his or her subordinates. Blindly dumping AI-generated work product into open court is about as clear-cut an ethical violation as you can find.

To your larger point, law firms would love to automate a bunch of paralegal and associate-level work; I've been involved in some earlier efforts to do things like automated deposition analysis, and there's plenty of precedent in the way the legal profession jumped on shepardizing tools to rapidly cite cases. Increased productivity isn't going to be reflected by partners earning any less, after all.

Its not and you don’t.

When a legal person (either a natural person or corporation) is doing something illegal like unauthorized practice of law, you sanction that person. The fact that they use an AI as a key tool in their unauthorized law practice is not particularly significant, legally.