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One of my favorite parts of this forum is moments like this, when someone puts my thoughts into words better than I could. I agree with every word.
I have the exact same view on AI art. I have quite low skills in "artistic taste", it's never I skill I've been good at or sought to develop much (low reward per n time vs things I like more). But now I can get to make funny images and concept art and express ideas in mediums that were previously locked to me. What fun! Yet there's people crying and screaming on the internet because like game developers are using AI agents to help them make games faster+better. I'm just excited for the golden age of AI gameslop. Good dev studios are going to be absolutely cooking.
I'm hoping this window of time lasts a while. I'm adjacent to the legal world and they're going to use every institution they wield (many!) to keep themselves in this state for as long as they can.
I mean, there's no way that the legal profession doesn't outlaw AI use in law the moment it becomes a threat to their jobs, right? Lots of law makers are lawyers, and I don't think they are above using the levers of power to make sure their profession can't be replaced.
I'm not sure how they'll catch attorneys who are careful about the end products they're filing.
You might see attorneys staying suspiciously effective despite juggling large caseloads, making surprisingly adept legal arguments in their briefs while their performance at a live hearing is lacklustre.
But yeah it'll be banned from any client or public-facing roles to large extents.
AI use by attorneys will get lots of attention for job market and ethics reasons, but the courts are 100% unprepared for the day when pro se litigants start filing piles of plausible-sounding briefs in their traffic ticket/misdemeanor/family court cases.
They're already doing it in low-stakes Civil cases.
Ask me how I know.
The UK NIMBY community was one of the first groups to take up legal AI with Objector. Every significant planning application now receives multiple lengthy AI-generated objections stating every plausible legally valid reason for rejecting it.
The UK is handed access to the demigod machine and immediately wishes for all development to grind to an absolute halt. They've created the Saul Goodman protocol.
On the other hand, if the legal system grinds to a halt when every single participant is able to level every single possible legal argument that might return their desired result, that's a good sign that things need to be streamlined and reformed, and an incentive to do so.
On the YIMBY side, it should in theory make it way easier to get permitting and to anticipate all likely objections
Seriously, if the legal system is slanted in even the tiniest way towards either side in a given type of case, the ability to exploit every possible legal advantage will result in hugely asymmetric outcomes for the 'favored' side. Might make it clear precisely where the scales of justice need some re-balancing.
And I'd hope there are cases where the use of LLMs facilitates mediation that obviates the need for litigation entirely.
The problem is that objections can be generated based entirely on the papers in a way which becomes arbitrarily cheap given good enough LLMs, but even if they are anticipated responding to them may involve expensive activity in the real world, like bat surveys in the most notorious example. It seems to me that giving both sides LLMs will increase the number of "cheap to raise, expensive to rebut" objections.
That isn't really any different than it is now, though. If a dedicated NIMBY group wants to oppose a project by any means possible, they can hire a lawyer who will argue that §902(a)(4) requires a bat survey, and they might win. A citizen group that generates a massive filing that that nobody understands and basically just list arguments looks impressive from their perspective but gets shot down immediately whenever they have to go in front of a judge and the attorney for the municipality or whoever explains to the judge why §902(a)(4) doesn't apply in this case (which if it obviously did, they would have already done one), and may even produce a report from the guy who does the bat surveys explaining why one wasn't needed in his opinion, and the judge smiles and nods while the pro se NIMBY guy fumbles through his brief trying to find the part about the bats that he can't remember because he didn't even read the whole thing let alone understand the whole thing, and the judge tosses the complaint.
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