Chief Justice Roberts Says AI Will Transform How the Courts Work
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
>In 1905, Justice David Brewer somewhat ungenerously referred to his law clerk as "a typewriter, a fountain pen, used by the judge to facilitate his work."
...
>Law professors report with both awe and angst that AI apparently can earn Bs on law school assignments and even pass the bar exam. LEGAL RESEARCH MAY SOON BE UNIMAGINABLE WITHOUT IT.
[Emphasis MINE]. I contend that it is already unethical for doctors/lawyers to NOT be utilizing LLM-like systems]
>..."hallucinations," which caused the lawyers using the application to submit briefs with citations to non-existent cases (always a bad idea).
HA HA HA HA — I love a witty justice, even one without humility.
>MACHINES CANNOT FULLY REPLACE KEY ACTORS IN COURT
[Emphasis MINE]. Not YET, Chief.
>I predict that judicial work — particularly at the trial level — will be significantly affected by AI.
MF'n Duh!
>Best wishes to all in the New Year
...cause corporate profits will rise, and junior-level clerkships might become less-existant.
¢¢
[1] PDF: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...
Bah. I was working on an appellate matter recently that involved some nuanced applications of well-known precedents. I tried to use GPT-4 to assist in exploring the issues, but I found it useless. It was unable to engage in a sophisticated discussion and instead preferred to speak in canned generalities. For what GPT-4 was offering, a quick trip to a bookmarked treatise on Westlaw would have been just as easy, and trustworthy.
>I tried to use GPT-4 to assist in exploring the issues, but I found it useless.
These systems are mirrors, and you have yet to figure out the correct prompting.
Once "PACER-AGI" becomes commercially-viable (IMHO, the major hold-up is liability from hallucinations), you will see an even-more-alarming rate of judicial redundancy.
Nope, you're holding the phone wrong.
Most of the "innovative logical analysis over novel issues" that I have personally witnessed/directed/felt... has to do with comparing dead/living authors' POVs, between their fictional universes.
Of course, this is a reflection of humanity, having elsewhere made such comparisons... but the ability to harness the patterns/connnections of just SO MANY unique POVs — is absolutely BEYOND HUMAN.
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Thanks for your informative perspective, and for sharing =D
LLMs, like Pepsi test incredibly well with the first use.
It’s a different story once you start dealing with it long term, hallucinations being a core issue ( feature, not a bug - so its not going anywhere)
With that said, there is 1 place that it will work well: Code. Since words are law and product, this is a straight productivity boost.
The other place it should have an impact is law, however nothing akin to a law copilot is making the rounds. I’m curious why. Is there simply more code available to train on that cases? Does the word length of legal documents break context windows?
Therefore, it's much harder to rip them off in bulk in order to train your LLM.
With regard to the feeling underlying the snark, the reason judges have power to overturn laws enacted by the people is that the people agreed to be bound by the Constitution as the supreme law of the land when they ratified it. We thus have to take into consideration what they believed they were agreeing to. If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom.
Unless you're arguing the Supreme Court is made up of necromancers, that's exactly what they do. If they had some objective understanding of what consensus the founding fathers or the people would have reached about any issues of the time, much less the thorny and complex issues of today, there would never be a split decision, nor disagreements between them based on their individual interpretations, nor reversals.
Not that their beliefs and judgements exist entirely in a vacuum, but the results are called opinions for a reason. Educated opinions are still just that.
And I'm not even going to mention that the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, itself, isn't even Constitutional, thus not a power the people who drafted or ratified the Constitution agreed that it should have, at least not the point of actually putting it in writing in the only document where it mattered. They just decided they had that power, solely based on their wisdom.
I mean, it doesn’t sound great, but I’ll take the “wisdom” of a group of people who are aware of a couple centuries worth of context over the “wisdom” of a group of people without that awareness.