Yeah, I don't know about the whole "THEY'RE on the hook". When it gets to the point where you discover that your lawyer didn't do what they're supposed to do, you're deep in the hole.
A recent experience for me was a lawyer I hired just forwarding whatever their LLM service said. Granted it was for a commercial contract so doesn't require that much legal muscle, I imagine, but I had to go through multiple rounds of feedback just to point out problems in their amendments. And the response was something along the lines of "yeah that could be a problem, let me review it". It was quite a bit of money too but the experience left me without much confidence that having a lawyer review the contract was any better than just running it through any capable model myself.
Then... double-check it yourself? The whole issue with hiring a lawyer in the first place is that defeats the point for the minuscule amount of claims being made.
Yes, but there are free resources available that guide you on how to go through the process without consulting a hallucination machine.
Judges don't like their time being wasted, and they doubly don't like plaintiffs and defendants who don't even go to the effort of trying to follow decorum.
And, I'm just throwing this one out here; contempt of court is one of the vanishingly few civil offenses you can be held in custody for.
And consulting an LLM is a great way to find guides and get basic information on feasibility and effort of bringing a claim. LLMs are not a replacement for critical thinking, and they never have been.
Just ask for citations by forcing the LLM to provide a verbatim quote from a linked source. If the LLM is incapable of doing so without hallucinating (cough, Gemini, cough) use a better one.
I don't get the LLM hate on this site sometimes. Just because it is easy to use an LLM irresponsibly doesn't mean all LLM usage has to be irresponsible.
I think the problem is that the original recommendation here was "just use an LLM" not "use an LLM [in this responsible manner]".
As an anecdote: I know people currently preparing to file suit against a former roommate who decided to leave mid lease and stop paying because they had an LLM convince them that they could just do that (they definitely can't, it's not even close under local tenancy laws).
Which fits with my general impression that LLMs are extremely inclined to validate that you can do whatever you want to even when that's not how the law works and my expectation that using them naively for legal matters is a really bad idea.
And applied to this specific case I can easily imagine an LLM picking up on the commenters outrage and supporting them that they're right, when I tend to agree with the actual author's comment that it doesn't seem like they have any actual damages since they fixed it for $20 (not that I'm a lawyer).
Not requiring a lawyer and not doing your due diligence aren't mutually exclusive.
Just because you don't need a lawyer doesn't mean it's not in your best interest to get one.
A lawyer isn't going to hallucinate case law that doesn't exist. And if THEIR AI does? THEY'RE on the hook, not you.
Yeah, I don't know about the whole "THEY'RE on the hook". When it gets to the point where you discover that your lawyer didn't do what they're supposed to do, you're deep in the hole.
A recent experience for me was a lawyer I hired just forwarding whatever their LLM service said. Granted it was for a commercial contract so doesn't require that much legal muscle, I imagine, but I had to go through multiple rounds of feedback just to point out problems in their amendments. And the response was something along the lines of "yeah that could be a problem, let me review it". It was quite a bit of money too but the experience left me without much confidence that having a lawyer review the contract was any better than just running it through any capable model myself.
Then... double-check it yourself? The whole issue with hiring a lawyer in the first place is that defeats the point for the minuscule amount of claims being made.
So it's not worth it to file the claim then!! What's so hard to understand about that?
You need legal advice? You need a lawyer.
The lawyer costs more than what you've lost? Sorry, you're SOL then unless you want to piss off a judge and definitely not get the verdict you want.
Again, small claims court's entire reason for existence is that you do not need a lawyer so that you can pursue small claims like this easily.
Yes, but there are free resources available that guide you on how to go through the process without consulting a hallucination machine.
Judges don't like their time being wasted, and they doubly don't like plaintiffs and defendants who don't even go to the effort of trying to follow decorum.
And, I'm just throwing this one out here; contempt of court is one of the vanishingly few civil offenses you can be held in custody for.
And consulting an LLM is a great way to find guides and get basic information on feasibility and effort of bringing a claim. LLMs are not a replacement for critical thinking, and they never have been.
Basic hallucinated information...
Just ask for citations by forcing the LLM to provide a verbatim quote from a linked source. If the LLM is incapable of doing so without hallucinating (cough, Gemini, cough) use a better one.
I don't get the LLM hate on this site sometimes. Just because it is easy to use an LLM irresponsibly doesn't mean all LLM usage has to be irresponsible.
I think the problem is that the original recommendation here was "just use an LLM" not "use an LLM [in this responsible manner]".
As an anecdote: I know people currently preparing to file suit against a former roommate who decided to leave mid lease and stop paying because they had an LLM convince them that they could just do that (they definitely can't, it's not even close under local tenancy laws).
Which fits with my general impression that LLMs are extremely inclined to validate that you can do whatever you want to even when that's not how the law works and my expectation that using them naively for legal matters is a really bad idea.
And applied to this specific case I can easily imagine an LLM picking up on the commenters outrage and supporting them that they're right, when I tend to agree with the actual author's comment that it doesn't seem like they have any actual damages since they fixed it for $20 (not that I'm a lawyer).
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