tangeli

Lawyers getting caught using AI and submitting errors to the court has been a big problem for years

It wouldn’t be a big problem if the unreliability of LLMs were part of ongoing professional development, use of LLMs without thorough fact checking was clearly barred by professional ethics, and lawyers were immediately disbarred for presenting false evidence if it came from an LLM.

It remains a “big” problem because it isn’t big enough for anyone to do anything about it, beyond criticizing and ridiculing lawyers who do it.

Even most of those that I deal with that do have a website, don’t have a contact form or email address. Just a link to their facebook page and their app, as if everyone in the world has a smartphone and mobile coverage.

Requiring Meta to have humans accessible in customer support will not solve any of the real problems at Meta. Unless Meta wants to hear from and meaningfully, helpfully respond to their data sources, it will do nothing but allow abusive people to abuse the humans in customer support. And if they want to hear and respond, they don’t need a law to require them to do it. Nothing is stopping them from doing it, except their own priorities.

I just spent a month and many interactions with real humans at my electricity provider, which is a service much more important to health, safety and quality of life than anything Meta provides. The issue was one of safety and security of supply issue due to degraded equipment.

The humans in customer support were uniformly ignorant of technical requirements and business processes. Unable to answer basic questions about roles, responsibilities, timelines or even the possibility of getting anything done about the issues.

The only tool at their disposal was a job system in which they could create jobs. So they asked me what sort of jobs they should create. I don’t know their business organization or processes, so I couldn’t advise them. All the jobs they created were rejected due to being created incorrectly or inappropriately. Never with any feedback to me, of course. I had to call back and wait half an hour to an hour to speak to a human, each time I wanted an update. They didn’t even have a means to escalate my call to someone with knowledge of the business processes or authority to do anything other than open more jobs. They couldn’t re-open jobs that had been closed without any action taken or information provided. They couldn’t open new jobs with any priority on the basis that weeks and multiple prior jobs had resulted in no useful response. They had no information about when a job might be dealt with: they could not articulate any commitment to response timelines.

It wasn’t the fault of the humans in customer support, beyond their choosing to continue working in such a dysfunctional organization. It was the fault of the management that deliberately created the dysfunctional organization and business processes. But none of that management was available via customer support.

If Meta doesn’t want to hear or respond to their data sources, they won’t. It makes no difference if there are humans in support or not.

Fortunately, I was able to switch electricity providers.

Regulating trivial aspects of trivial services is not beneficial. It’s just an additional increment of control for those in power, available to be abused for more wealth and power. And a precedent for yet more regulation.

The only regulation required is for everyone to terminate their Meta accounts. A Big Brother nanny state is not utopia, except for the few in power.

The Law of Agency is fairly well established, including:

Liabilities in Agency Law

Both the principals and agents are responsible for actions performed under the agency law. The liabilities may come about in various circumstances:

• Liability of the Principal: Generally, the principal is liable for actions performed by the agent within the scope of the authority. This includes contractual liability and third-party claims.
• Agent’s Liability: The agent may be held personally liable if they act outside the scope of the authority vested in them, are fraudulent, or do not indicate that they are acting on behalf of a principal.
• Third-Party Liabilities: Where an agent falsely represents that they have authority when they do not, third parties may sue the agent or the principal, depending on the situation.

It would be interesting to see, in a case like this, whether the courts decide that there was an agent with agency and, if so, exactly who the agent was. If there was an agent and agency according to the Agency Law, it seems the court would have to recognize the ‘AI agent’ as a legal entity, distinct from Meta, or hold Meta responsible as the agent, as Meta ran the ‘AI agent’ and contracted with the seller for its services.

I wonder how long it will be until this is put to the test in court by some disgruntled purchaser who is out more than the cost of a keyboard.

That’s a very good summary, but left out: furthering the extreme inequality of wealth and power - to the detriment of almost everyone.

That’s because, thus far, they get away with choosing not to distribute any of their trillions of dollars to the suppliers of the information they consume - money has only gone to the suppliers of hardware and power, and to influencing politicians and rewarding investors. That’s their choice, and they should not be allowed to continue to make that choice. Good luck to the NYT.