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American_Stereotypes t1_j6t8hj1 wrote

Reply to comment by microgiant in An AI robot lawyer was set to argue in court. Real lawyers shut it down. : NPR by persianphilosopher

Nah, they're going after it because it's some jackass using the court system as a marketing stunt for technology that is currently nowhere near at the level it would need to be to make effective arguments, and there's no ethical or legal framework for how to actually implement the tech.

Or to put it another way: that AI is not legally an attorney. Client-attorney privilege wouldn't apply for any information you put in to support your side of the case. If it fucks up your case (and it will fuck up a good number of cases, because AI is good at regurgitating data but it doesn't actually understand it, and the law requires a good understanding of nuance), you can't appeal on the basis of insufficient counsel. There's no standard of ethics for AI lawyers.

And that's just a few of the more obvious issues.

I'll put it this way. Imagine you're a pilot, then some asshat with no piloting experience comes along and tries to stage a marketing stunt by having his under-tested, unregulated, fully automated plane that still has some pretty concerning design elements take off from and land at a busy regional airport. You'd be pretty fuckin alarmed too, even if it does somehow work, because nobody's actually ready for that technology to be in use and there's no oversight to make sure it keeps working.

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imtotallyfine t1_j6wqp6g wrote

I’ve been playing with AI to assist in my legal work lately. It fucks up a lot. It will provide claims that cannot be substantiated. I’ll request the source for something that is solely untrue and the source will say something completely different. The technology is absolutely not there but people think it is because it spits out something that looks good and like it might be true. It can’t interpret things, and that’s a big and important gap

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Stupid_Guitar t1_j6tqfei wrote

I dunno, it's still essentially a high tech way of representing yourself. Probably not much worse off, in the case of fighting a traffic ticket, than if you decided to do it without a lawyer or a court-appointed lawyer (I'm sure they don't do that for traffic cases, maybe some other misdemeanor stuff though).

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American_Stereotypes t1_j6tuag3 wrote

That's partially why I'm so concerned. This tech will almost certainly be disproportionately used by people who are either unable to afford a real lawyer or who are distrustful of the legal system and lawyers, and those kinds of people are already extremely vulnerable and have a hard time navigating the legal system, even without shoddy unregulated technology supposedly helping them.

I'm sure we'll get to the point where this isn't a pipe dream one day, but that day ain't today, and in the meantime it could do a lot of damage to a lot of people, even in something as generally low-stakes as traffic court.

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Reflex_0 t1_j6tcrgp wrote

Are airplanes not usually on auto-pilot for most of the time other than landing and taking off ?

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American_Stereotypes t1_j6tdntz wrote

Missing the point of the analogy, but I can work with that.

Yes, they do, but even then they still have a human pilot at the controls in case the auto-pilot goes awry or a situation it's unprepared to deal with comes up (which still happens from time to time), and there's an entire regulatory apparatus that oversees the implementation of auto-pilot and that has procedures to sort out what to do if it does go wrong.

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