I think there will be a market for firms that aggressively market themselves as non-AI, and then as more people turn towards that human connection we'll go full circle
> In a blind evaluation of nearly 3,000 anonymized comparisons, professors rated AI responses significantly higher than answers written by other professors, with AI winning 75% of head-to-head matchups.
As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others.
I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.
I think that's the right intuition. Legal AI feels especially dangerous because the output can look competent while hiding jurisdiction-specific footguns
Yeah this could be interesting. A lot of the spotlight has been on “law firm stuff” like demand letters and writing contracts…
But imagine if a dev team didn’t have to go engineer -> product manager -> legal team to get a question answered on local data retention requirements. You could ship that much faster.
Personally I think this is very good. One of the hardest things out there is maintaining a society in the face of changing times and it's because law is dense and slow.
Marc Andreessen argued that we've already reached AGI. He says that the top AI models give better answers than 99% of people he has access to, and he has access to some of the best people in their field.
I'm getting more convinced. I mean, sure it makes dumb mistakes sometimes but its a particular set of self serving mistakes, commenting out tests in order to pass. We obv don't want this behavior but I wouldn't say it's dumb.
It'll be like the Turing test, which we just blew past years ago and no one cared. After all the hand-wringing about sentience and rights of the AI if it passes the Turing test, and now we just have AI bots running 24/7 writing slop.
>Marc Andreessen argued that we've already reached AGI. He says that the top AI models give better answers than 99% of people he has access to, and he has access to some of the best people in their field.
He has access to employees and yes-men. What he actually needs to hear, nobody will tell him, AI even less so. Every shit idea he has, would be "what a bright idea"-ed by both everyone around him and AI.
And of course there's the little matter that he makes money and increases his power by selling AI. What seller doesn't promote their stuff as the greatest ever?
My best guess is that Gemini was trained on the textbooks that the questions are meant to test against, thus they are probably better at explicit recall of those questions or related questions.
This is a pretty limited introductory course based on what it says in the methods of the paper itself.
Incredible that the common people will be able to wrestle the right to rule of law away from the bloated legal caste, who have built themselves quite the moat.
The inaccessibility of justice is a huge driver of inequality. Any tools which bridge this gap will help make a more just society.
The profession is walking into a court room 90 minutes late because you know the judge's work pattern then going "hey Mike, how are the kids" after 22 years in the same jurisdiction. Then they old boys haggle based on how much the lawyer is charging. You are basically paying for access to the social club. Better outcomes when part of the in-group of course.
Isn't "getting greater" the more accurate representation, though?
In 'critical' industries, the error rate is massively important, and if the quality of search is reaching an acceptable error rate, that's quite big news.
> rated AI responses significantly higher than answers written by other professors, with AI winning 75% of head-to-head matchups.
That's the problem, you never know when the 25% deliver a true stink bomb, and that's not considering prompting - while a fair prompt/question maybe considered objective, it's very easy to stray.
In the hands of a domain expert, AI is useful.
In the hands of the naive, it is a foot gun.
I killed my Arch installation and was stuck at the GRUB prompt.Unwilling to brush up my rusty knowledge of GRUB syntax, I asked Gemini for help. The commands Gemini suggested would have wiped my hd...
Once Gemini was told that I was using BTRFS, the suggestion from Gemini looked a bit more sane, but still looked incorrect to me.
It was only after I informed Gemini that I was using a NMVE with BTRFS that it finally produced a sane command.
I beat lawyers twice before generative AI even existed.
Recently I asked Gemini a few questions about personal conflicts in everyday life. It's often too conservative, with views too shallow for the problem. So I still handle human conflicts myself. I only outsource the templated stuff like routine chat replies or marketing copy though it saves me huge amount of time. People who quote AI in serious conflicts are too weak to handle them on their own.
What the LLM cannot do is explain why it said what it said, when cross-examined. It simply hallucinates the best account of why someone would have said such a thing as it said, same as it can give a probable account of why someone else said something different. The question 'But why did you say this not that ...?' does not lead it to make explicit its grounds for what it said, but just to make a new more complicated statement.
I'm surprised Stanford Law would go along with this over-reaching press release title. How about "For common first-year contracts-law questions, law professors preferred AI-generated answers to professor-generated answers"
I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading.
Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol
There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models. Other models show up elsewhere, why not there?
I'm no lawyer, but I'm a pretty competent statistician and can confidently say this paper has a smell to it. I can't call it bullshit, but there are red flags all over
But does it really matter? It seems fairly obvious that AI is going to outperform professors. While the studies run, there are three more model releases that change the calculus entirely. I wonder how much we are learning with these studies about what is going on.
Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.
I find it entirely likely that the preference for the AI generated answers is entirely due to the confidence of its assertions. Given the numbers of evaluations each prof had to do, there’s no way they researched the answers thoroughly. But if there’s one thing we all know LLMs can do well, it’s to generate text that sounds extremely confident. And that signal is appealing in choosing which of two statements you’d give to students.
More than that, the entire structure of the study is pointless. They set up as a question/response and then had humans rate the response. That's literally what LLM's are trained to do, which ultimately is convincing a human to click the "I like this one better" button on it's response.
> There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models.
The main results also don’t seem to know what a “model” is, as the two “models” it refers to are “stock Gemini 2.5 Pro” and “a retrieval-augmented version of NotebookLM”.
One of which is a model, and the other of which is an interface backed by different models depending on exactly when the analysis was performed.
I never get the same answer from any two lawyers. I hate law as a result. With developers you might get disagreements based on experience, but there's usually a strong consensus on specific things, with lawyers and courts its all over the flipping place. I wouldn't be surprised if LLMs can "pass" on paper (ie college exams) but in practice, they might 'struggle' in different courts.
...On the other hand, if an LLM has access to every transcript of every case a Judge has overseen, they might have an unfair advantage in any case... Hmmm...
This all assuming the AI lawyer doesn't hallucinate and start referencing cases that don't exist.
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Stanford and its donors of course want to replace anyone but its administrators, so they cheer on such anti-intellectual nonsense.
75% win rate seems pretty good!
Paper link: https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/salinas_...
I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.
Tell me you've never been the executor of an estate in the United States without telling me.
Believe it or not...
A lot can go wrong if you have real life human lawyers draft a legal document.
However, the good news is that a whole bunch of laywer positions in drafting docs and research will be able to be eliminated due to AI.
But imagine if a dev team didn’t have to go engineer -> product manager -> legal team to get a question answered on local data retention requirements. You could ship that much faster.
I think, in the right hands, this could be huge.
I'm getting more convinced. I mean, sure it makes dumb mistakes sometimes but its a particular set of self serving mistakes, commenting out tests in order to pass. We obv don't want this behavior but I wouldn't say it's dumb.
It'll be like the Turing test, which we just blew past years ago and no one cared. After all the hand-wringing about sentience and rights of the AI if it passes the Turing test, and now we just have AI bots running 24/7 writing slop.
How does everyone else feel?
He has access to employees and yes-men. What he actually needs to hear, nobody will tell him, AI even less so. Every shit idea he has, would be "what a bright idea"-ed by both everyone around him and AI.
And of course there's the little matter that he makes money and increases his power by selling AI. What seller doesn't promote their stuff as the greatest ever?
This is a pretty limited introductory course based on what it says in the methods of the paper itself.
Julian Nyarko
LOL!The inaccessibility of justice is a huge driver of inequality. Any tools which bridge this gap will help make a more just society.
In 'critical' industries, the error rate is massively important, and if the quality of search is reaching an acceptable error rate, that's quite big news.
https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
and where they wanted to ban words such as "chief", "stupid", "karen" and "American"
https://reason.com/2022/12/21/stanford-elimination-harmful-l...
That's the problem, you never know when the 25% deliver a true stink bomb, and that's not considering prompting - while a fair prompt/question maybe considered objective, it's very easy to stray.
I killed my Arch installation and was stuck at the GRUB prompt.Unwilling to brush up my rusty knowledge of GRUB syntax, I asked Gemini for help. The commands Gemini suggested would have wiped my hd...
Once Gemini was told that I was using BTRFS, the suggestion from Gemini looked a bit more sane, but still looked incorrect to me.
It was only after I informed Gemini that I was using a NMVE with BTRFS that it finally produced a sane command.
Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol
There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models. Other models show up elsewhere, why not there?
I'm no lawyer, but I'm a pretty competent statistician and can confidently say this paper has a smell to it. I can't call it bullshit, but there are red flags all over
> They calibrated AI responses to match the length and structure of human answers
which I would guess removes AI's hallucinations and errors somewhat.
Do you doubt that educational value of a law professor can vary from 0 to somewhat reasonable? You are not studying screws here.
The main results also don’t seem to know what a “model” is, as the two “models” it refers to are “stock Gemini 2.5 Pro” and “a retrieval-augmented version of NotebookLM”.
One of which is a model, and the other of which is an interface backed by different models depending on exactly when the analysis was performed.
...On the other hand, if an LLM has access to every transcript of every case a Judge has overseen, they might have an unfair advantage in any case... Hmmm...
This all assuming the AI lawyer doesn't hallucinate and start referencing cases that don't exist.
Even saw some where they just slapped interviews + protocol into chatgpt as 'methodology' to extract the results -_-. Peer reviewed and published.
You can confidently say that you are unsure?