Popular AI chatbots from OpenAI Inc., Google LLC, and Meta Platforms Inc. are prone to “hallucinations” when answering legal questions, posing special risks for people using the technology because they can’t afford a human lawyer, new research from Stanford University said.
This article is pointless.
These chat bots are generative. Yes, they generate fake laws and fake cases and fake outcomes. That’s how they work. Expecting anything else out of something designed to create is pointless and a waste of time. They aren’t designed to not lie. That’s so well established at this point I think the people doing this research on fucking chatGPT for law questions are either mooching funding just to keep a job or are bored.
If they trained a LLM on nothing but a dictionary, law books, and fed it case outcomes, it would probably be a reasonable tool for law offices. Make sure it only outputs indexes to real cases and real laws, and make sure that law offices have to legally follow up on and verify these things but I see this as an actual use case for these types of bots.
There still is a lot of nuance involved, especially for a layman who wouldn’t even begin to understand the terminology required to start the search, so a human lawyer would/should still be involved, but these tools would absolutely help speed up the judicial system and probably lower costs.
I would argue this is exactly why this article is not pointless. If AI is not for fact finding, people need to be made aware of that.