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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1918 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 4, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Tooting my own horn. December 1, 2022 I predicted:

My honest bet is that any student currently in their first year of Law School will be unable to compete with AI legal services by the time they graduate. Certainly not on cost. The AI didn't incur 5-6 figure loans for it's legal training.

Put another way, the AI will be as competent/capable as a first-year associate at a law firm inside 3 years.

This was before GPT4 was on the scene. Reiterated it 3 months ago

And then today I read this nice little headline:

Artificial Intelligence is now an A+ law student, study finds

If they can stop the damn thing from hallucinating caselaw and statutes, it might already be there.

But, let me admit, that if we don't see downward pressure on first-year wages or staffing reductions this year, I missed the meatiest part of the prediction.

There's the counter-argument that AI lawyers will actually stimulate demand for attorneys by making contracts way more complex. I don't buy it, but I see it.

If they can stop the damn thing from hallucinating caselaw and statutes, it might already be there.

Sure, but hasn't that always been the challenge? This feels like it boils down to "if they can fix the problems, it'll be great", which is true but applies to everything.

I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing. Citing to a nonexistent case or statute compromises the entire brief or argument. A decent first year associate might misinterpret a statute or case, or miss that the case was overturned, but they wouldn't make up cases from whole cloth and build their arguments off those.

For a lot of tasks, you just need to go through and proofread or fix up the places where it filled in basic info that it obviously didn't have.

But citing a case that doesn't exist to build an argument is like asking it to design a bridge and it get the tensile strength of steel completely wrong, or perhaps it makes up a type of material that doesn't exist and hallucinates its properties as part of the specifications.

And maybe it does that, I don't know. But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.

And it really shouldn't be hard to fix, the caselaw and statutes are already simple to look up. Just teach the thing to use WestLaw.

So I do expect them to solve that particular class of hallucinations pretty handily, even if it will still completely fudge its outputs when it doesn't have an easy way to check.

But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.

Yeah this is something that gets me about the frequent code-based hallucinations too. The things will make up non-existent APIs when the reference docs are right there. It does seem like it wouldn't be hard to hook up a function that checks "does this actually exist". I assume it must not actually be that simple, or they would've done it by now. But we'll see what they can do in the future.

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