A multimillion-dollar conspiracy trial that stretched across the worlds of politics and entertainment is now touching on the tech world with arguments that a defense attorney for a Fugees rapper bungled closing arguments by using an artificial intelligence program. Prakazrel “Pras” Michel argued that the use of the “experimental” generative AI program was one of a number of errors made by his “unqualified, unprepared and ineffectual" trial attorney before his conviction earlier this year, accord

A multimillion-dollar conspiracy trial that stretched across the worlds of politics and entertainment is now touching on the tech world with arguments that a defense attorney for a Fugees rapper bungled closing arguments by using an artificial intelligence program.

  • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    That’s irrelevant. The AI is not licensed to practice law; so if the lawyer didn’t perform any work to check the AI output, then then the AI was the one defending the client and the lawyer was just a mouthpiece for the AI.

    • Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I feel like this is the same as if the lawyer had used a crystal ball to decide how to handle a case. If he lied to clients about it or was also selling crystal ball reading services that seems pretty bad.

      • zaph@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        But is it a mistrial if the lawyer uses autocorrect?

        If you’re found guilty because of a typo you’re probably going to have a successful appeal.

        If the lawyer reviewed the output and found it acceptable then how can you argue it was practicing law.

        This could very well be what he has to prove. That the lawyer didn’t do his due diligence and just trusted the ai.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        But is it a mistrial if the lawyer uses autocorrect?

        No, that’s a bad question. Autocorrect takes your source knowledge and information as input and makes minor corrections to spelling and suggestions to correct grammar. It doesn’t come up with legal analysis on its own, and any suggestions for grammar changes should be scrutinized by the licensed professional to make sure the grammar changes don’t affect the argument.

        And your second statement isn’t what happened here. If the lawyer had written an argument and then fed it to AI to correct and improve, then that would have the basis of starting with legal analysis written from a licensed professional. In this case, the lawyer bragged that he spent only seconds on this case instead of hours because the AI did everything. If he only spent seconds, then he very likely didn’t start the process with writing his own analysis and then feeding it to AI; and he likely didn’t review the analysis that was spit out by the AI.

        This is an issue that is happening in the medical world, too. Young doctors and med students are feeding symptoms into AI and asking for a diagnosis. That is a legitimate thing to use AI for as long as the diagnosis that gets spit out is heavily scrutinized by a trained doctor. If they just immediately take the outputs from AI and apply the standard medical treatment for that without double checking whether the diagnosis makes sense, then that isn’t any better than me typing my symptoms into Google and looking at the results to diagnose myself.