43 pointsby kristjansson5 hours ago11 comments
  • lucfranken3 hours ago
    How it is made should be irrelevant in the process. There is no way to stop people using LLM’s or other tools to create products like this report.

    It should be globally a standard check to verify incoming documents and to determine their validity.

    The interesting part on this case is that we see the real human aspect of it. Just asking for a report only finding the positive facts instead of doing real research.

    That is an ethics question. When behaving like this (and it happened before LLM’s) it should be seen as an ethics violation. If not done there is no value in those legal procedures anymore.

    The facts people have to accept is that the only place to check this is the deliverable. They are lucky now to have found the source, the prompts and the background but so many reports are entered without being so obvious.

    It’s a terribly huge and complicated task.

    • dwroberts4 minutes ago
      > How it is made should be irrelevant in the process.

      No? If you are employed (or requested in this case I guess) to offer your expert opinion, the expert they want to hear from is you, not someone else you farm your work out to - whether that’s an LLM or another person

    • jen729w39 minutes ago
      You're at work. You need to produce an artefact – a project proposal, say. 100-odd lines of Gantt, costs, that your BD team will send to the client.

      You get Copilot to do this for you.

      Later at the review meeting, errors are found. A bunch of stuff was missed, the costs were off.

      Whose fault is it? Who looks stupid? If it's bad enough, who gets fired?

    • 2 hours ago
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    • Terr_2 hours ago
      > How it is made should be irrelevant in the process.

      Is that true? Almost all answers have value based on how they were reached, especially when (like this case) there's no trivial and objective verification step.

      For example, suppose you live next to a volcano, and I sell you some software that predicts when it will erupt. One day you dig into it and realize I just hard-coded "not today" [0] which is 99.999% accurate.

      I think you would be quite angry, and justifiably so... But why would that be if "not today" was correct, and "how it's made is irrelevant to the process?"

      Tying it back to the court case, we expect professional witnesses to look at the details and then reach a conclusion, and to reach out based their own professional expert knowledge of cause and effect... Not to pick a conclusion and try to make the details fit, nor to offload executive function to an LLM. Even if they render the same boolean verdict, we care about what process was taken.

      [0] https://xkcd.com/221/

      • lucfrankenan hour ago
        Totally agree on your example:

        > One day you dig into it and realize I just hard-coded "not today" [0] which is 99.999% accurate.

        It only becomes visible when you do the research.

        The justice process in this example just has to check and verify the inputs. There is no way around it. Today it is this expert, tomorrow another one.

        When someone is caught that's an ethical issue and there could be more structural consequences as well. Like blocking the person as an expert or other means. As the expert becomes untrustworthy.

      • drdaeman2 hours ago
        “How” as in “what tool” is a different “how” as in “with what intent”. LLM was used to produce a bunch of arguments supporting a pre-intended outcome. Doesn’t matter much whether it was a machine or a human (and whether it was “expert” himself or a ghostwriter), but it does matter - a lot - how the outcome was the pre-selected and the task was to cherry-pick the facts to support it.
  • Sharlin31 minutes ago
    This is also another obvious example of misalignment on the part of ChatGPT. If the thing had any semblance of an actual system of ethics, or emulation thereof, it would refuse requests to try to make facts fit a predetermined conclusion. In a legal case, no less!
  • tveita18 minutes ago
    Interesting that he pointed it to the CSB video - those are great explanations for us laymen, but I assume the LLM would prefer a written report.

    Luckily it's still up https://youtube.com/watch?v=CFVUSDzHL8A

    I was worried the videos would already be disappearing given Trump's attempts to shut it down https://www.chemicalprocessing.com/safety-security/risk-asse...

  • fblp3 hours ago
    The article is pay walled.. Does it explain why the expert witness shared screenshots of these prompts? Voluntarily or required to?
    • meinersbur3 hours ago
      https://archive.is/zKgVp

      > During discovery in the case, Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, found a five-page document called “Citation Overlay,” which appeared to have been generated by AI. Moye recognized the Citation Overlay document as being from ChatGPT, and demanded all of the prompts Autenrieth used from 3M’s lawyers. The deposition was paused for three hours while they were gathered, and Moye was given 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations that Autenrieth had when creating the report.

      • sph2 hours ago
        So he got caught by a keen eye, but could have likely got off scot free, and have his generated report accepted by the court.
    • phlummox3 hours ago
      https://archive.is/zKgVp

      Many paywalls are fairly "soft", and can be got around by visiting an archived version of the page you're interested in, at https://archive.is.

      • mr_mitm19 minutes ago
        Fun fact: archive.is can even bypass a lot of hard paywalls and no one knows for sure how they do it. There's been at least on debate on HN with no clear conclusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060891

        They probably use a combination of residential proxies, actually paying for a lot of subscriptions (including lots of small regional publications apparently) and cleverly removing the "My Account" link, referrer shenannigans, and who knows what else.

      • close042 hours ago
        On the other hand archive.is is notorious for not working for many people. I am trapped in an endless reCaptcha loop, being repeatedly asked in Thai or in Japanese or any of these random Asian languages to mark "whatever" in the pictures, or being asked to scan QR codes for something, and so on.
  • toasty2283 hours ago
    We're in the meat proxy era, unplug your brain and feed the machines!

    I personally know people who ask chatgpt what to eat, to which bar to go, to plan their vacations, it's insanity.

    • 3 hours ago
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  • scotty793 hours ago
    If you let your legal process decide based on rhetoric, you'll have people use AI to generate rhetoric.
  • jauco3 hours ago
    Obligatory link: the whispering earring https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

    (I couldn’t remember the title or the author. So I asked claude for it of course)

    • mock-possum2 hours ago
      It’s a fun idea, I do wonder why the artifact is locked away at the end of the story - what harm could come from it?

      Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever really needed help being happy - I’d be curious to hear its suggestions, but I’m not sure what it could tell me that I didn’t already know - and further, there would likely be plenty of times where it would make more sense to do the thing that doesnt bring me the most happiness. “Flex your arm by 35%” just doesn’t sound like a plausibly compelling suggestion, and “the ring is never wrong” is really only useful if my sole goal is to maximize my own happiness.

  • x3n0ph3n33 hours ago
    My father was an expert witness in construction defect and he told me about some of the times he was hired to produce a report about the causes of some defect or failure and that sometimes the entity that hired him was at fault. He usually wasn't retained for trial in those cases, but it earned him a reputation for honesty.

    Seeing these pay-for-opinion "experts" fills me with a deep disgust.

  • senectus12 hours ago
    I hate that this is how AI is being used.. but tbh this is a nothing burger...

    This is exactly what a good lawyer/team does.. they argue against what their client is accused of.

    a good prosecutor should be able to dismantle the AI argument the same way they would a human argument. just because its AI generated doesn't mean its a corrupting of the process or cheating..

    the process is the same either way, its corrupt or broken the same way either way, it works the same way either way.

    • Sharlin39 minutes ago
      This was an EXPERT WITNESS, not an advocate. Though unfortunately (and bizarrely) it appears that in the US, expert witnesses in civil cases can be hired to say whatever the hiring party wants them to say without it being perjury.
  • OutOfHere2 hours ago
    Why not just bypass the expert and just ask GPT to come to a determination? /s