from a federal judge in Mississippi
I SO want to love that state, but fuck me, this comes at zero surprise.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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“If an attorney does this, a judge can demand explanations, but it’s not true in the other direction,” Frohock said. “We will probably never know what happened, unless an appellate court demands it.”
That sucks. There should be some sort of consequence for doing this.
the only place at this point that can come from is from the governed: the populace
Vibes based legal system, sure, why not?
That's just called common law
This made me laugh. Not wrong though!
Another awesome Regan appendage
LLMs are being shoved into so many bits of software (office suites, programming tools, etc.) it doesn't surprise me that something like this has happened.
Law people have a duty to be up to date on this stuff tho. If you dont know how to avoid LLMs from seeing or interacting with your stuff then you shouldnt be allowed to practice law.
To really be sure would require knowing what software is actually doing - not just taking the claims made by the programmers (or more likely, the mere owners) of the proprietary software.
That sounds doubly difficult job.
Judges usually don't know this stuff, but they primarily work with systems and software supplied by the state...whose experts should know what they are doing.
My bet is that this guy decided to work on personal equipment, probably in violation of the rules. Being a judge, he's unlikely to be sanctioned for it, and will certainly learn from the experience. If anything, there may be some internal discussions which we'll never hear about.
Law is an area where AI can add value, though... searching through past rulings and legal opinions is tedious, and anything that can assist to find needles in haystacks would be welcome. It shouldn't be used to write legal judgements or arguments though...
To really be sure would require knowing what software is actually doing
i am pretty sure you do know whether you wrote a text, or it just magically spawned in front of your eyes out of thin air - you don't need degree in computer science for that.
Creating text is not the only issue, it may be trained from your confidential files.
Also no, you don't know what it's doing so you could be blindsighted by the latest AI update making unexpected changes. Not only from good-intentioned features but also bugs, or malicious anti-features after the CEO throws their toys out of the Twitter pram.
no malicious update can force you to generate a text and file it in court as your own work.
Consider that a program can edit the file while running at any point, not merely during user input. Like a virus with access to user's files it could even edit a document that's not even being displayed to the user on the screen.
well that would be fucked up for sure. are you suggesting any existing program works like that, or are just speculating what if?
This may be out of date but in this video by Lawful Masses lawyers are concerned that software AI tools which somehow (I don't recall) help them understand a case. This issue is the AI should not use information sourced from another client's confidential case/documents to inform them about another case but they don't know how it works. Responses from Microsoft were not forthcoming.
I would argue they can't know unless they have access to the source code to verify what any (local) AI can do (not personally do it, but a trusted 3rd party audit which isn't behind closed doors).
Pretty sure there is such a thing as legally certified software where the liability would then lie with the software vendor.
I know a law firm who creates garbage like this without even using AI
Should have judged the situation better