Sure, wasn’t sure that even needed to be said at this point, but even so, this form was probably produced by a broker. Even if it does not cover things like this https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-w..., I think it was likely accurate as to his holdings in publicly traded stocks and index funds.
It's unfortunate these days that question needs to be asked, but with Clarence Thomas's shenanigans and the USSC's refusal to implement a code of conduct, here we are.
If I were John Roberts I, too, would rather talk about the shiny robot god than all of the specious, inconsistent rulings on literally made-up court cases I had been deciding.
It appears many here are nervous about the Elephant in the Room, which is why we’re graying out over Wagging the Dog…anything to avoid addressing the problem everyone is still talking about…
For all the consternation about Copilot and AI coding tools, its looking like legal work is as much if not more setup for disruption.
Document review is already being done by AI, lawyers are using AI to beef up closing arguments and review arguments, AI researchers to go through the relevant cases for citations have been worked on for awhile.
Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done. Roberts is commenting that they are going to be disappointed if they think they can get legal protections that X or Y must always be done by a human.
Agreed. LLMs seem almost purpose built for the boilerplate part of legal work. "Read this user agreement and point out any unusual or particularly risky clauses."
Also using AI (ChatGPT) to write briefs, appeals, etc. Just edit. Saves a lot of time, which reduces the number of paralegals needed. This ship has already sailed. But it does not eliminate the need for a well-trained person to edit and review.
You will need really trained people to review whatever the AI writes and also need to be able to check sources in case the AI hallucinates and starts referencing made up case law or precedents. So maybe paralegals will transform into reviewers or something similar.
this is how document review works now basically. It used to be lots of lawyers got hired to go through the documents, now AI does it, and flags things for actual lawyer to review (along with suggestions), so what was the work of a couple of dozen lawyers is like maybe 2.
this is one of the huge issues for the unemployed lawyer problem, as those jobs were the entry level for straight of school lawyers. I expect similar problems with dev roles coming soon.
Worse, judges are writing decisions and evaluating cases based on this.
The problem is that we’re going to have people litigating court cases and stupid bureaucratic nonsense within companies by lobbing nonsense that nobody has read at each other. Everyone will wink and nod, but these organizations and institutions will be exponentially more clueless.
As technologists, it’s easy to shrug. What do you do when a judge takes your kid away after using an LLM to read and interpret bullshit generated case notes that a CPS worker generated with another LLM?
What you are describing has being happening for a long time in tech. It was suppose to make our life easier and do things we don't want to do, but has it? Seems like we are just become salves of digital technologies now days.
Instead what we got instead are surveillance capitalism and now this LLM/AI stuff that becomes much better are emulating human behaviour and languages. UX in software has NOT improved, and I dare to say it has gotten worse. Just feel the performance of iOS 6 on iPod touch vs the lates iOS. Tech over quarter century has just tech getting more complex, and made more easily to centralised and consolidate control. Is this what we really want?
Technologists are spectacularly bad at understanding how much the system relies on trusting that people will do something vaguely reasonable/legal/prosocial, just how that trust is built up and preserved, and how fragile that trust really is. A lot of Big Tech disruption and moneymaking has been based on ignoring this point to consume systemic trust without replenishing it.
I think judges will continue to enjoy sanctioning lawyers for quoting fake cases. It's pretty easy to check if the citations are real or not. The legal system is not some API you can just spam with bullshit. There are serious consequences for doing that. The fun part comes when the Woke API refuses to make arguments for case law that goes against its woke programming.
Replace LLM with "clerk" and "generated case notes" with "copy pasted from my standard legally approved phrasing" playbook. Government workers who fill out standard reports already have standard forms pre filled with the results they know they are landing out, with certain sections that differ ready to be edited while the rest stays the same, look at things like warrants as an example. When I worked a government job i was literally handed templates by my supervisor of "pre approved ways to phrase things", that they percieved would help avoid lawsuits or any contest.
> The problem is that we’re going to have people litigating court cases and stupid bureaucratic nonsense within companies by lobbing nonsense that nobody has read at each other.
At an abstract level, this sounds like a precursor to war. Everyone has competing interests and the peaceful way to resolve them is communication. When that stops force starts.
Maybe the out is that there is some automated sense of listening and agreement.
> Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done.
The legal field does not have a strong cartel at the moment.
In 1940 and in 1970, the population of lawyers was about .13-.16% of people in the US. Currently, it's 3x higher at .39%... after 3 years of declining numbers.
The market is saturated. Large numbers of lawyers can't find enough work, or have moved to other fields.
Try setting up a business for something relatively minor like helping people contest a traffic ticket (no representing them in court) and see what happens. You dont need a full legal education to do basic contestation of traffic tickets, but the legal system requires it.
There is a plethora of things that are minor, don't require going to court, and can be handled via bog standard forms and documents that are just "replace the names" and that lawyers have their paralegals do for them in their entirety. But the paralegal cant go into business on their own can they?
What is the equivalent of the nurse who can get you antibiotics in the US legal system?
> What is the equivalent of the nurse who can get you antibiotics in the US legal system?
A paralegal. In about half the US, said nurse practicioner must be working under a supervising doctor, just like the paralegal works under a supervising lawyer.
Nurse practitioners have as much, if not more, education than attorneys. And they still need to work within the regulations of our system.
I get what you are trying to communicate - maybe we are over-regulated... yet any time your professional work has the potential to harm your customer if done incorrectly, I don't think having some educational requirements are unreasonable.
You raise a very worthwhile topic, because both fields have expanded, and they have expanded along very different paths.
The medical field has splintered. Osteopaths kind of invented their own thing and broke into medical doctors' monopoly. Registered Nurses can do some things, but not others. BSNs. CNAs. Nurse Practitioners. Physicians Assistants. Chiropractors. etc. The strength of their cartel has led to attacks by new and novel qualifications, and the compelling need for more medical providers has allowed these attacks to successfully carve out roles.
Some can prescribe medications, others can't. Some are limited to specific medications. Others can perform surgery, others can't. Some can diagnose diseases, etc. Moreover, some qualifications are a step toward a higher qualification, others are traps that don't progress you to an MD/DO at all.
The legal field seems far more egalitarian in that any lawyer can practice any area of law (except patent law), and people can generally represent themselves and their minor children without any qualifications. Folk don't need a lawyer to contest tickets, or to draft contracts that they're a party to, or to negotiate their own settlements, etc.
However, appallingly, the general public is not allowed to prescribe medicine for themselves or their children. Folks cannot buy contacts / glasses on their own, etc. Folks shouldn't need a nurse to get antibiotics for ourselves, and yet we do.
Indeed. Legal documentations are much more shared-source than software, by nature. Most agreements need to be in the possession of multiple parties and their attorneys in a reviewable form, for example, and court filings make the most contentious of such agreements public record.
This is a massive boon to the training data set. GitHub is also massive, but legal has other systemic advantages as well (e.g. being similar to past work is a structural advantage rather than just a practical one).
> “Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing,” Roberts wrote Sunday. “Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”
I'm not saying machines would do better, but this really lays bare how ridiculous the justice system is.
Yeah, it sounds like explanation why machine can be better after all, if it does not add or remove years of punishment based on sweat, moment of hesitation or fleeting break in eye contact.
That has no relevance to my question. What I want to know is if admittance of guilt and sincerity is at all relevant to sentencing, not about whether a particular mechanism is fit to determine either point.
I think it's rather unfair to say that we can't accurately judge sincerity unless you talk about levels of precision.
Because, for instance, accuracy in judgment of sincerity is a basic requirement of getting through any day for any human. In other words, we can certainly judge it accurately enough for many purposes.
Gullible people and great liars abound. People fall for "we're the IRS and we need you to buy some iTunes gift cards" all the time, the entire country is deeply split on what's "fake news" and what isn't; we're clearly not cut out for these assessments. Normal life works reasonably OK, but sentencing isn't a "normal life" scenario; it's the sort of thing that sends people to jail wrongly for decades fairly frequently.
Yes, all of which sentencing is also based on human judgement of persons character, witness statements, expert statements, presentation of evidence, etc etc
Judgement of sincerity is woven into the entirety of court procedures. Why would you exclude this additional relevant data point regarding sincerity of allocution?
A witness who's promised something like immunity should absolutely be treated with skepticism. An expert who's paid $5k/hour to testify should, as well. They're also subject to cross-examination during those processes.
"Gee, I'm so sorry I drove drunk, please give me a lower sentence" is so transparently self-interested it should be discarded as evidence.
Treating someone with skepticism is a function of judgement of sincerity. Not sure how that is in any way in disagreement with my point. Which is that we should and must exercise judgement of persons' interior properties in court.
It’s not ridiculous, unless you have something so much better to propose that would put it in that light.
For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness.
A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name.
>For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness.
And that's the entire problem.
A priori certainty of legal outcomes isn't a problem to be "fixed", it's a basic requirement of any reliable legal system.
If purely mechanical solutions lead to bad outcomes, that's a good thing! It means those solutions can be acknowledged as bad and removed or reworked. If instead you arbitrarily make the pain go away because it's convenient you're stuck with a bad solution.
How can you write that a system based on human judgement leads to leniency as often as harshness and call that good? That sounds like the definition of unfair bias.
Not the person you’re replying to, but I did not read that as a claim that variance due to judgment is the best possible outcome, just that it is a less bad outcome than the variances and abuses that rigid, mechanistic “justice” produces.
Because leniency when applying the law is often the most just course of action. Consider for instance a battered spouse who murders their abuser. Murder laws don't have built in leniency for every conceivable mitigating circumstance because it is expected that judges and juries will decide when it's appropriate to be lenient on a case-by-case basis.
"As often as" in colloquial English doesn't mean "with exactly the same frequency as". Typically it means (and I meant): "with at least the same frequency as".
This, by the way, is the kind of non-mechanical, subjective analysis judges and juries are expected to perform all the time.
> A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name.
It would be a parody of the name. Justice depends on context. The world is too complicated for any set of mechanistic rules to cover every possible context.
Attempts to remove context from justice end badly at best and are often intentionally abused to leverage the “justice” system as a weapon.
That's why we have the phrase: the letter and the spirit of the law. Because sometimes the letter of the law is, in certain circumstances, in contradiction with the spirit of the law.
Fake citations from ChatGPT generated motions has come up a few times, mentioned here. This highlights how AI is misused. It should be used to enhance human work not to replace it. Example: if AI allows a lawyer to effective write 10 motions a week instead of 2, that's a win. The human is still responsible for those motions. If they include fake case citations, that's on the lawyer, not the AI.
But people want to use AI to replace that lawyer, taking them out of the loop completely.
Every fake citations should be on the lawyer who submitted it. That'll end this real quick.
> “Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing,” Roberts wrote Sunday. “Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”
Removing judges from this may well be a good thing. This allows a lot of bias to seep in to the process. Judges have been caught giving vastly different sentences to similar cases where the only real differences were race, gender and background (eg [1]). An extreme example is Brock Turner [2]. That judge should've been impeached.
75 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadInquiring minds want to know because there are certainly more pressing legal issues than AI that can have trouble with simple math.
Why am I not surprised?
I’m for “you have a job, you automatically get enrolled” medical coverage. But how he went about the ruling was surprising.
Document review is already being done by AI, lawyers are using AI to beef up closing arguments and review arguments, AI researchers to go through the relevant cases for citations have been worked on for awhile.
Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done. Roberts is commenting that they are going to be disappointed if they think they can get legal protections that X or Y must always be done by a human.
this is one of the huge issues for the unemployed lawyer problem, as those jobs were the entry level for straight of school lawyers. I expect similar problems with dev roles coming soon.
The problem is that we’re going to have people litigating court cases and stupid bureaucratic nonsense within companies by lobbing nonsense that nobody has read at each other. Everyone will wink and nod, but these organizations and institutions will be exponentially more clueless.
As technologists, it’s easy to shrug. What do you do when a judge takes your kid away after using an LLM to read and interpret bullshit generated case notes that a CPS worker generated with another LLM?
Instead what we got instead are surveillance capitalism and now this LLM/AI stuff that becomes much better are emulating human behaviour and languages. UX in software has NOT improved, and I dare to say it has gotten worse. Just feel the performance of iOS 6 on iPod touch vs the lates iOS. Tech over quarter century has just tech getting more complex, and made more easily to centralised and consolidate control. Is this what we really want?
Replace LLM with "clerk" and "generated case notes" with "copy pasted from my standard legally approved phrasing" playbook. Government workers who fill out standard reports already have standard forms pre filled with the results they know they are landing out, with certain sections that differ ready to be edited while the rest stays the same, look at things like warrants as an example. When I worked a government job i was literally handed templates by my supervisor of "pre approved ways to phrase things", that they percieved would help avoid lawsuits or any contest.
With the LLM, everyone will clutch their pearls and be shocked.
At an abstract level, this sounds like a precursor to war. Everyone has competing interests and the peaceful way to resolve them is communication. When that stops force starts.
Maybe the out is that there is some automated sense of listening and agreement.
The legal field does not have a strong cartel at the moment.
In 1940 and in 1970, the population of lawyers was about .13-.16% of people in the US. Currently, it's 3x higher at .39%... after 3 years of declining numbers.
The market is saturated. Large numbers of lawyers can't find enough work, or have moved to other fields.
Edit: Link to report: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...
There is a plethora of things that are minor, don't require going to court, and can be handled via bog standard forms and documents that are just "replace the names" and that lawyers have their paralegals do for them in their entirety. But the paralegal cant go into business on their own can they?
What is the equivalent of the nurse who can get you antibiotics in the US legal system?
A paralegal. In about half the US, said nurse practicioner must be working under a supervising doctor, just like the paralegal works under a supervising lawyer.
So there isn't one.
NPs can independently practice - to some extent - in the other half.
(You'll find a lot of paralegals coming very close to practical indepdendent practice, though. Supervision can be quite theoretical.)
I get what you are trying to communicate - maybe we are over-regulated... yet any time your professional work has the potential to harm your customer if done incorrectly, I don't think having some educational requirements are unreasonable.
The medical field has splintered. Osteopaths kind of invented their own thing and broke into medical doctors' monopoly. Registered Nurses can do some things, but not others. BSNs. CNAs. Nurse Practitioners. Physicians Assistants. Chiropractors. etc. The strength of their cartel has led to attacks by new and novel qualifications, and the compelling need for more medical providers has allowed these attacks to successfully carve out roles.
Some can prescribe medications, others can't. Some are limited to specific medications. Others can perform surgery, others can't. Some can diagnose diseases, etc. Moreover, some qualifications are a step toward a higher qualification, others are traps that don't progress you to an MD/DO at all.
The legal field seems far more egalitarian in that any lawyer can practice any area of law (except patent law), and people can generally represent themselves and their minor children without any qualifications. Folk don't need a lawyer to contest tickets, or to draft contracts that they're a party to, or to negotiate their own settlements, etc.
However, appallingly, the general public is not allowed to prescribe medicine for themselves or their children. Folks cannot buy contacts / glasses on their own, etc. Folks shouldn't need a nurse to get antibiotics for ourselves, and yet we do.
That's news to me.
Edit: When buying for nearsightedness.
This is a massive boon to the training data set. GitHub is also massive, but legal has other systemic advantages as well (e.g. being similar to past work is a structural advantage rather than just a practical one).
Let everybody else be disaffected by AI—that’s fine.
I hate this species
I'm not saying machines would do better, but this really lays bare how ridiculous the justice system is.
You should not incentivise people to lie, or give a specific answer.
Nor should you incentivise innocent people to proclaim their guilt
It's like giving someone a longer jail sentence for having a blue aura instead of a pink one.
Because, for instance, accuracy in judgment of sincerity is a basic requirement of getting through any day for any human. In other words, we can certainly judge it accurately enough for many purposes.
Judgement of sincerity is woven into the entirety of court procedures. Why would you exclude this additional relevant data point regarding sincerity of allocution?
"Gee, I'm so sorry I drove drunk, please give me a lower sentence" is so transparently self-interested it should be discarded as evidence.
For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness.
A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name.
And that's the entire problem.
A priori certainty of legal outcomes isn't a problem to be "fixed", it's a basic requirement of any reliable legal system.
If purely mechanical solutions lead to bad outcomes, that's a good thing! It means those solutions can be acknowledged as bad and removed or reworked. If instead you arbitrarily make the pain go away because it's convenient you're stuck with a bad solution.
This, by the way, is the kind of non-mechanical, subjective analysis judges and juries are expected to perform all the time.
Suppose it were a voluntary option. What happens when Black people prefer AI judge over the white judge?
How often are we really asking about empathy for a situation vs empathy for social privilege?
It would be a parody of the name. Justice depends on context. The world is too complicated for any set of mechanistic rules to cover every possible context.
Attempts to remove context from justice end badly at best and are often intentionally abused to leverage the “justice” system as a weapon.
But people want to use AI to replace that lawyer, taking them out of the loop completely.
Every fake citations should be on the lawyer who submitted it. That'll end this real quick.
> “Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing,” Roberts wrote Sunday. “Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.”
Removing judges from this may well be a good thing. This allows a lot of bias to seep in to the process. Judges have been caught giving vastly different sentences to similar cases where the only real differences were race, gender and background (eg [1]). An extreme example is Brock Turner [2]. That judge should've been impeached.
[1]: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/racial-d...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner#Sentencing