this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024

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Judge rebukes law firm using ChatGPT to justify $113,484.62 fee as “utterly and unusually unpersuasive” (www.theregister.com)

submitted 7 months ago by L4s to c/technology

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Judge rebukes law firm using ChatGPT to justify $113,484.62 fee as “utterly and unusually unpersuasive”::Use of AI to calculate legal bill 'utterly and unusually unpersuasive'

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago

🤔 I should write a program which always outputs a big number.

How much should we charge our customers?

113,484.62

How many programmers did it take to create this AI?

113,484.62

What's 2+2?

113,484.62

It just always gives you the legal advice you need.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The legal eagles at New York-based Cuddy Law tried using OpenAI's chatbot, despite its penchant for lying and spouting nonsense, to help justify their hefty fees for a recently won trial, a sum the losing side is expected to pay.

NYC federal district Judge Paul Engelmayer, however, rejected the submitted amount, awarded less than half of what Cuddy requested, and added a sharp rebuke to the lawyers for using ChatGPT to cross-check the figures.

The briefs basically cited ChatGPT's output to support their stated hourly rate, which does depend on things like the level and amount of research, preparation, and other work involved.

Cuddy told the court "its requested hourly rates are supported by feedback it received from the artificial intelligence tool 'ChatGPT-4,'" Engelmayer wrote in his order [PDF], referring to the GPT-4 version of OpenAI's bot.

"As the firm should have appreciated, treating ChatGPT's conclusions as a useful gauge of the reasonable billing rate for the work of a lawyer with a particular background carrying out a bespoke assignment for a client in a niche practice area was misbegotten at the jump," Judge Engelmayer said.

Benjamin Kopp, a lawyer at Cuddy Law, told The Register his firm's use of AI wasn't anything like cases that fabricated court documents; this particular situation had nothing to do with influencing the legal process.

The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[+] EdibleFriend 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

I've asked ChatGPT to explain maths to me before. I can't remember what it was but it was something when I knew the answer and was trying to calculate the starting value.

It told me the answer and I asked for the explanation. It went something like this (not actual, just a tribute):

Step 1: 1 + 1 = 2
Step 2: 2 * 2 = 4
Step 3: 4 / 8 = 0.5

Me: Uh, the answer is supposed to be 9,000,000.

ChatGPT: Sorry, it seems you are right. Here's the corrected version:

Step 1: 1 + 1 = 2
Step 2: 2 * 2 = 4
Step 3: 4 / 8 = 9,000,000

[–] EdibleFriend 15 points 7 months ago

nods knowingly as if he doesn't suck ass at math and understands the mistake

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Sometimes GPT says it’s using the correct values, but somehow gets the wrong answer regardless. Also the opposite happens frequently, and that’s when I realized I was pushing it too hard.

Don’t ask it to calculate the ratio between the surface areas of the Moon and Earth. Instead, ask what are the relevant radiuses are and calculate everything yourself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So it did it correctly but you told it to hallucinate? Or did it just fail from the get to?

It really isn't great at math, but I've had okay results for equations where common integrals/trigonometry is used. It's quite easy to spot the mistakes and can lead you to the answer even if it's wrong in the explanation. Pretty much like how it can hallucinate while programming but still end up useful.

WolframAlpha is still my go to though if I'm lazy. But I haven't payed for it in ages.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It was a question like where I knew the answer and needed the correct value to put in the equation to get that end result. I wish there was a better way to search previous chats because it would help if I could remember the context. But anyway, the first time it got the maths right from the starting value to the ending value, but it didn't actually answer the question because the ending value was not the one I asked for. It was as good as if it gave me a random answer.

I pointed out that it hadn't answered the question, and that's when it just changed the last step to make it the answer I was looking for. It was supposed to adjust the starting value to make it have the correct outcome.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think what you needed was something of an inverse problem solution, for some calculations it may be quite hard to compute. Were you successful in finding the starting value without ChatGPT's help?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I can't remember! It was probably a year ago, but knowing me I probably tried random starting numbers until I got the answer I wanted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Haha yes, eager to please.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

ChatGPT ain't good at moth from what I keep hearing.

For quick short hand for X generations it's been in the family: 30 years per generation is a good short hand.

For example: 1 generation is me (30), 2 generations is my dad(60), 3 generations is grandpa(90), 4 generations is great-grandpa(120), etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Well lookie at this highborn noble we got here! 30 year generations PAH! 15 years is how we do it. I coulda met my great great grandma if all that smokin' didn't do her in with emphysema.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Lol

Honestly my family's generations are much closer than my example, it's just round numbers in my example for simple math

Mine are closer to 20 and past the last 2, the lower side of 20. And one generation awhile back was... Too close by a good margin of you catch my meaning.

Great great grandpa was an odd duck when I met him but he was a hoot

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Bing Chat is good at maths as it has a special maths addon, but most normal LLMs aren't

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think the concern here is whether or not it used PEMDAS

[–] Cyclist 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Woah there! You mean BEDMAS.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think you mean Christmas

[–] Cyclist 2 points 7 months ago

That's cultural appropriation of Christmas for mathematical purposes! Burn the heretic!