California issues historic fine over lawyer's ChatGPT fabrications

> He thinks it is unrealistic to expect lawyers to stop using AI.

I disagree. It worked until now, and using AI is clearly doing more harm than good, especially in situations where you hire an expert to help you.

Remember, a lawyer is someone who actually has passed a bar exam, and with that there is an understanding that whatever they sign, they validate as correct. The fact that they used AI here actually isn't the worst. The fact that they blindly signed it afterwards is a sign that they are unfit to be a lawyer.

We can make the argument that this might be pushed from upper management, but remember, the license is personal. So it's not that they can hide behind such a mandate.

It's the same discussions I'm having with colleagues about using AI to generate code, or to review code. At a certain moment there is pressure to go faster, and stuff gets committed without a human touching it.

Until that software ends up on your glucose pump, or the system used to radiate your brain tumor.

I'm curious what part makes you think "everyone" is endorsing continued use by lawyers to write briefings.

Whenever an "AI" article is posted here the comments are heavily astroturfed.

I'm a lawyer and I do not use AI. I was given a product test of an AI legal solution and it was terrible.

> The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court

This is a bit like all the stats like "this is appears to be an unprecedented majority in the last 10 years in a Vermont county starting with G for elections held on the 4th when no candidate is from Oklahoma".

Lots of things are historic but that doesn't necessarily mean they're impressive overall. More interesting is how many of these cases have already been tried such that this isn't "historic" for being the first one decided.

expecting the same level of fine to an individual person as opposed to a faceless corp really shows how numb you must be. for an attorney to be fined that much is not normal. TFA even shows example of higher fines issued to law firms, while still not as high as your zillion doubloons hyberbole it still shows the distinction between individual and s/corporation/law firm/. EU fines have been progressively getting higher especially for repeat offenders. it would be unwise to expect different in legal matters

yeah, is $10,000 a lot of money to a lawyer?

>Do lawyers and judges not by now have software that turns all these citations into hyperlinks into some relevant database? Software that would also flag a citation as not having a referent? Surely this exists and is expensive but in wide usage...?

Why would I pay for software what I could do with my own eyes in 2 minutes?

Part of an issue is that there's already in existence a lot of manual entry and a lot of small/regional courts with a lot of specificity for individual jurisdictions. Unification of standards is a long way away, I mean, tech hasn't even done it

Hopefully the fines grow exponentially for repeat offenders. Seems like now, lawyers can use AI to DDOS the other counsel.

I know a lawyer who almost took a job in state government where one of the primary duties was to make sure that the punctuation in the bills going through the state legislature were correct and accurate. For her, part of the appeal of the job, was that it would allow her to subtly alter the meaning of a bill being presented. Apparently it is a non trivial skill to be able to determine how judges are likely to rule on cases due to say, the presence, or the absence of an oxford comma.

There was an entire team dedicated to this work, and the hours were insane when the legislature was in session. She ended up not taking the job because of the downsides associated with moving to the capital, so I don't know more about the job. I'd be curious how much AI has changed what that team does now. Certainly, they still would want to meticulously look at every character, but it is certainly possible that AI has gotten better at analyzing the "average" ruling, which might make the job a little easier. What I know about law though, is that it's often defined by the non average ruling, that there's sort of a fractal nature to it, and it's the unusual cases that often forever shape future interpretations of a given law. Unusual scenarios are something that LLMs generally struggle with, and add to that the need to creatively come up with scenarios that might further distort the bill, and I'd expect LLMs to be patently bad at creating laws. So while, I have no doubt that legislators (and lobbyists) are using AI to draft bills, I am positive that there is still a lot of work that goes into refining bills, and we're probably not seeing straight vibe drafting.

>> lawmakers submitting AI-generated language in bills or amendments?

Most people would be shocked to find the majority of bills are simply copycat bills or written by lobbyists.

https://goodparty.org/blog/article/who-actually-writes-congr...

Bank lobbyists, for example, authored 70 of the 85 lines in a Congressional bill that was designed to lessen banking regulations – essentially making their industry wealthier and more powerful. Our elected officials are quite literally, with no exaggeration, letting massive special interests write in the actual language of these bills in order to further enrich and empower themselves… because they are too lazy or disinterested in the actual work of lawmaking themselves.

a two-year investigation by USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and The Center for Public Integrity found widespread use of “copycat bills” at both federal and state levels. Copycat legislation is the phenomenon in which lawmakers introduce bills that contain identical langauge and phrases to “model bills” that are drafted by corporations and special interests for lobbying purposes. In other words, these lawmakers essentially copy-pasted the exact words that lobbyists sent them.

From 2011 to 2019, this investigation found over 10,000 copycat bills that lifted entire passages directly from well-funded lobbyists and corporations. 2,100 of these copycat bills were signed into law all across the country. And more often than not, these copycat bills contain provisions specifically designed to enrich or protect the corporations that wrote the initial drafts

I mean, we've seen laws that were written by lobbyists with zero changes. Does it matter if it was AI generated or not at that point? The congress critters are not rewriting what they've been told to do if they've even read it after being told what to do.

for first offenses for something like this you'd suggest jail time? hope you find excuses to skip your next jury summons. however, it is typical in jury selection to be asked by the defense if you'd be able to agree with a minimum sentence while the prosecutors like to ask if you'd be able to agree to the maximum. personally was asked if I could agree to 99 years for someone's first offense of GTA. I said no, and was dismissed. Sounds like you'd have said yes.

>jail time

Surely it would suffice to eject him from the California bar.

Your response seems a bit over the top especially considering it is a civil case

There's something grimly hilarious about knee-jerk demands for jail time for [other profession] for using AI, when a bunch of us here are eagerly adopting it into our own workflows as fast as we can.

Why jail time for lawyers who use Chat-GPT, but not programmers? Are we that unimportant compared to the actual useful members of society, whose work actually has to be held to standards?

I don't think you meant it this way, but it feels like a frank admission that what we do has no value, and so compared to other people who have to be correct, it's fine for us to slather on the slop.