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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.

This is why I am confident AI cannot replace experts. At best AI is only a tool, not a replacement. Expertise is in the details and context...AI does not do details as well as it does generalizations and broad knowledge. Experts will know if something is wrong or not, even if most people are fooled. I remember a decade ago there was talk of ai-generated math papers. How many of these papers are getting in top journals? AFIK, none

Finding sources is already something AI is amazing at. The search functions in google, lexis, etc are already really good. The problem is some training mess up that incentivizes faking instead of saying "i dont know" or "your question is too vague"? Realistically, there is nothing AI is more suited to than legal research (at least, if perhaps not drafting). "Get me the 10 cases on question XXX where motions were most granted between year 2020 and 2022" is what it should be amazing at.

It could be a great tool, but it's not going to replace the need to understand why you need to search for those cases in the first place.

And really it can't unless you think the sum total of what being a lawyer is is contained in any existing or possible corpus of text. Textualism might be a nice prescriptive doctrine but is it a descriptive one?

LLMs are exactly as likely to replace you as a Chinese room is. Which one would probably rate that very high for lawyers, but not 1. Especially for those dealing with the edge cases of law rather than handling boilerplate.

In practice, don't law firms already operate effective Chinese rooms? Like, they have researchers and interns and such whose sole job is 'find me this specific case' and then they go off and do it without necessarily knowing what it's for or the broader context of the request - no less than a radiologist just responds to specific requests for testing without actually knowing why the doctor requested it.

This is hard to say because I'm not a lawyer. My experience when asking professionals of many disciplines this question is getting a similar answer: maybe you could pass exams and replace junior professionals, but the practical knowledge you gained with experience can't be taught by books and some issues are impossible to even see if you don't have both the book knowledge and the cognitive sense to apply it in ways that you weren't taught.

Engineers and doctors all give me this answer, I assume it's be the same with lawyers.

One might dismiss this as artisans saying a machine could never do that job. But on some sense even the artisans were right. The machine isn't the best. But how much of the market only requires good enough?

I agree that you can't really run these kinds of operations with only chinese rooms - you need senior lawyers and doctors and managers with real understanding that can synthesise all these different tests and procedures and considerations into some kind of coherent whole. But chinese rooms are still pretty useful and important - those jobs tend to be so hard and complex that you need to make things simpler somehow, and part of that is not having to spend hundreds of hours trawling through caselaw.

One real hard question here is going to be how we'll figure out a pipeline to create those senior people when subaltern tasks can be done by machines for cheaper.

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