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Comment on Lawyer caught using AI-generated false citations in court case penalised in Australian first

The penalties here seem harsh but submitting something to a court that is false and misleading is a big deal, even if it was inadvertent.

I think the penalties are too harsh at all. This person is suppose to be a trained professional. Their right to practice law is based on their skills and their knowledge. It’s a high barrier that prevents most people from taking that job. And in this case, the person outsourced a key part of their job to a LLM, and did not verify the result. Effectively they got someone (something) unqualified to do the job for them, and passed it off as their own work. So the high barrier which was meant to ensure high-quality work was breached. It makes sense to strip the person of their right to do that kind of work. (The suspension is temporary, which is fair too. But these kinds of breaches trust and reliability are not something people should just accept.)

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tuff_wizard@aussie.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’d say of any high paid profession, the legal trade is the most likely to be decimated by ‘AI’ and LLM’s.

If you fed every case and ruling, law and statute into an LLM, removed it’s "yes, and’ing and had someone who knew how to write a effective prompt you could answer many, many legal questions and save a lot of time searching for precedence.

Obviously someone will have to accept liability if poor advice is given but I can see some hotshot lawyer taking the risk if it means he can handle 1000’s of cases at once with a few ‘prompt engineers’.

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- apostrofail@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  decimated by ‘AI’ and LLMs*
  
  ‘yes, and’ing* or “yes, and”ing*
  
  1000s* of cases at once
  
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- null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That’s not my experience, with the current state of the tech anyway.
  
  There are models on hugging face tuned exactly as you describe.
  
  Sure at some point in the future they will be helpful to draft legal submissions, but that’s not really what lawyers “do” in the same way accountants don’t spend their days doing math.
  
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- Typotyper@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  If they take the risk then they should suffer the risks should it fail. Disbar them
  
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  - agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Totally. However, I think so long as you manually verify, it should really be fine. It takes ages to find a case that establishes precedence, but confirming the details of the case once you’ve found it is relatively quick.
    
    If you skip the manual verification, yeah you deserve what you get.
    
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sqgl@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The lawyer is still allowed to practice but only as an employee, under supervision and checked quarterly.

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null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You seem to have a very high expectation of professionalism.

Trained professionals who are supposed to have skills and knowledge and experience make mistakes all the time, sometimes through ineptitude, but also through laziness.

Whether it’s Doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, any profession really. In many or most cases the client doesn’t suffer real harm, or if they do the costs of litigation would be higher than the compensation.

A referral to a professional body is usually not very serious. Doctors are referred to the board for malpractice all the time.

I’m a tax consultant. We’re regulated by the Tax Practitioners Board. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that they would take someone’s license over a submission to the ATO that relied on false cases. Basically they only take action in cases where there is little or no doubt that the practitioner sought to intentionally mislead the tax office.

So, you personally might not think the penalties are harsh, but I can assure you that restricting someone’s license to practice, whatever their profession, is a measure usually reserved for fraudulent behavior.

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