Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor Anthropic
Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor Anthropic
Back in 2023, we wrote how lawyers were filing briefs they’d written with ChatGPT. They thought it was a search engine, not a lying engine — and the bot would proceed to cite a whole pile of suppor…
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I get the problem with using a made up citations in your filing, but the idea for Harvey mentioned in the article is not all bad. If they can combine their LLM with a database of cases and create their software to not use any case not in this database, they would have a great start.
When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.
The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.
When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.
Exactly. Even if you ensure the cited cases or articles are real it will misrepresent what said articles say.
Fundamentally it is just blah blah blah ing until the point comes when a citation would be likely to appear, then it blah blah blahs the citation based on the preceding text that it just made up. It plain should not be producing real citations. That it can produce real citations is deeply at odds with it being able to pretend at reasoning, for example.
Ensuring the citation is real, RAG-ing the articles in there, having AI rewrite drafts, none of these hacks do anything to address any of the underlying problems.
Yea, and if you’re going to let the AI write the structure and have a lawyer go and rewrite the whole thing after validating it, why not remove the step and just have said lawyer actually write the brief and put their accreditation on the line?
That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.
That goes some way to explaining why programmers don't have a moral compass.
We have got to bring back the PE exam for software engineering.
When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.
That is why I called it a great start and not a finished product. I image there are a lot of legal cases to sift through and it is a lawyers job to at least keep track of the imporant ones (those which sets precedent), but knowing that there are multiple "lesser" rulings in your favour could be useful. And having a search enging that can find those based on a description of your current case? Not a bad idea to me.
The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.
I can only agree here.
That is why I called it a great start and not a finished product. I image there are a lot of legal cases to sift through and it is a lawyers job to at least keep track of the imporant ones (those which sets precedent), but knowing that there are multiple “lesser” rulings in your favour could be useful. And having a search enging that can find those based on a description of your current case? Not a bad idea to me.
Such databases have existed since basically the conception of common law, like a thousand fucking years ago. Good solutions exist and have existed without AI til today. It’s not a great start, it’s a running leap backwards off of a cliff into a trough of slop.
What's even the point in engaging in a discussion if you are going to dimiss anything related to AI out of hand?
I'm not talking about generating cases. I am talking about creating a software that can help you find cases matching your current case. You will get a list, look at it and keep any case what was of use. If the output is bad, the software is bad. Just like any search engine.
Did you even bother to read anything I wrote or did you just see the word "AI"? I'm done.
I agree, you are fucking done. good job showing up 12 days late to the thread expecting strangers to humor your weird fucking obsession with using LLMs for something existing software does better