Lawyers who cited fake legal cases generated by ChatGPT blame the software Lawyers facing legal sanctions from a federal court for filing a lawsuit containing fake legal cases generated by ChatGPT, say they feel duped by the software. Attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca representing legal firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman made headlines for submitting court documents with the Southern District …
Sort of, but not really. It's not that it's inaccurate, it's that it's not designed to be accurate, or to have any concept of facts. Large language models like this work by building models of languages and predicting a reasonable output (In ChatGPT's case word by word) for a specific query. There is no provision for said generated output being factual in any way, nor is there really a way to extend this model to include that.
> "So far, we've seen this method improve the accuracy of Bard's responses to computation-based word and math problems in our internal challenge datasets by approximately 30 per cent," it added.
Sadly, not well enough implemented to know that it is meaningless to quote an improvement without providing a baseline (or the resultant, either will do): Up from 70% to 93% is better than 3% to 4% accuracy rate.
For a laugh I asked Bard for the prime factors of the first 17 Mersenne primes. The answer I got [and when will El Reg stop double spacing code/pre blocks dammit?]:
The prime factors of the first 17 Mersenne primes are:
Code snippet
Mersenne Prime | Prime Factors
------------ | -------------
3 | 3
7 | 7
23 | 23
29 | 29
89 | 89
107 | 107
127 | 127
61 | 61
8191 | 3, 2^13
131071 | 7, 2^17
2147483647 | 2^31 - 1
2305843009 | 7, 2^31 + 1
281474976735 | 3, 5, 17, 2^43 - 1
347474966573 | 31, 2^43 + 1
3908816944097 | 7, 2^47 - 1
4398046511103 | 2^53 - 1
Use code with caution. Learn more
As you can see, the only Mersenne primes that have only one prime factor are 3, 7, and 23. All other Mersenne primes have at least two prime factors.
---- end Bard output
Bravo Bard, bravo! A result to stun the mathematical world.
It seems that although it can get obvious things right, it doesn't have that vital a second stage where - perhaps like a human - it might decide that since its confidence in the output is low, it really should check against some authoritative source (or in this case, some definitions).
It is not just lawyers...
As I wrote here about 3 months ago, ChatGTP also screwed up medical stuff. Or to put it more clearly, fabricated an answer, which was factually incorrect, in some instances pure fiction, sold as the truth. In short, when asking it a medical question it came back with incorrect answers and fabricated, non-existent literature references/ sources. Only difference with the situation described in the piece here is that we did it to check ChatGTP specifically, and knew what we were talking about. These lawyers apparently didn't...
Again, I personally think the problem is not with the tech, but the factor between keyboard and chair. And since the (intelligence) results there are not encouraging (as shown here), this might be a real issue and not a one off/ oddity.
In summary:
1. Lawyers typed some search request into a website
2. Website came back with some "results"
3. Lawyers took said results verbatim without checking anything
Their major failing was at step 3 and how that step was arrived at (whether AI or a *cough* reputable search engine) is pretty much irrelevant to their failing.
Other lawyers have tried to make the data that the lawyers came up with and failed via ChatGPT.
its pretty clearly the lawyers are lying and trying to blame tech.... it was the answerphone what did it, your honour,
Opening Arguments did a good breakdown of the case, its pretty the lawyers are being less than honest about all aspects of the case not just the ChatGPT bit https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/opening-arguments/id1147092464?i=1000614969994
Maybe, but it's also possible that ChatGPT just makes its answers really hard to reproduce. I don't know, I've never tried it, but somebody should do a baseline test of getting ChatGPT to reproduce an answer we know it gave before, after a month or so, just to check that this is indeed possible normally. Richard Feynmann wrote about this kind of thing in experiments: the best experiments have extra experiments going on behind them to make sure that the method they want to use really would show up the difference if it's there.
GPT generates answers randomly, meaning that it's not guaranteed that you'll get the same result if you just ask the same question multiple times. As far as I know, that's not even what was tried because the prompt isn't known word for word, so people have to try similar prompts. In addition, OpenAI have been known to add filters to eliminate embarrassing answers after they make the news, which this did weeks ago. This doesn't prove that the lawyers are telling the truth, but it means that a failure to reproduce doesn't mean that they made it up. In my opinion, it doesn't matter much because, whether they made up this excuse for the crap data or they did actually get and mindlessly accept the crap data, they've submitted said crap data to a court without having a clue about it which indicates their lack of responsibility.
Ot could work but even for tesla for example took 10 years at lest to get where it's at.
I recommend watching the legal eagle on youtube, one of his more recent videos was on this. Because it's on a plane there are special laws so all countries have close to Same laws when it comes to planes.
As well you would have to feed it all laws then as well up to date cases. I'm not 100% but there is something where all cases are always up to date.
You would need a ai to be built just for that
If those two lawyers think that they will be able to sue OpenAi over this they are going to be saddened to learn that not only has AI been in the court since Dec 2022, but a Pro Se litigant has made good use of the AI with out the same issue. The Pro Se litigant is me, and I checked my case law I used, and read the warnings ChatGPT tells you. They are fools if they press it.
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