AI keeps inventing fake cases. Lawyers keep citing them

58 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by voxadam

5 Comments

autoexec

8 hours ago

> “Humans essentially have a tendency to believe that machines have more knowledge than they do, don’t break and are infallible,” says Alan Wagner,

Anyone with any meaningful experience with using machines should know better. I suspect that people know that machines break and fail they're just lazy and are willing to hand off their work to a computer as often as they can get away with it. Often an excuse of "Not my fault, the computer did it" works because computers are widely known to be barely working and prone to errors.

It's an amazing feat of marketing that people trust AI when there are countless examples of AI being wrong (often hilariously), but in the case of lawyers I think the only solution is disbarment. It won't take many lawyers losing their license before other lawyers start doing the job they're being paid for again.

JellyBeanThief

4 hours ago

> Anyone with any meaningful experience with using machines should know better.

I think this should be "experience with making or maintaining machines" instead. It's those cases when you don't get to be lazy--you have to fix the machine yourself. As long as you're just the user, it's someone else's responsibility if your machine-aided work is wrong.

Yes, we can point out how that's not actually correct until we're blue in the face. But in practice, the way we have set up our economy and our institutions, it is correct.

sidewndr46

6 hours ago

That quote should be followed by "and will believe anything they read on the internet"

g42gregory

2 hours ago

Every single letter of what lawyer submit is his responsibility and his alone.

It does not matter if AI produces it or his second cousin, visiting from Antigua.

mrgoldenbrown

8 hours ago

Lawyers too cheap to pay an intern 1 hour of minimum wage to Google or lexis-nexis each cited case to make sure it actually exists. Then maybe another 1 hour of paralegal time to skim the summaries of the ones that passed the intern check to make sure they roughly match the AI description.