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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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I do not see how some tennis tournament switching to an electronic line judge has anything to do with using an LLM to judge criminal cases.

Okay, both things share the term "judge", but then I might as well say: "My municipality just decided to put up a new bank in their park. How long before the government takes over all the banks and financial independence becomes impossible?"

For a more concrete example of a step in that path:

I concur in the Court’s judgment and join its opinion in full. I write separately (and I’ll confess this is a little unusual) simply to pull back the curtain on the process by which I thought through one of the issues in this case—and using my own experience here as backdrop, to make a modest proposal regarding courts’ interpretations of the words and phrases used in legal instruments.

Here’s the proposal, which I suspect many will reflexively condemn as heresy, but which I promise to unpack if given the chance: Those, like me, who believe that “ordinary meaning” is the foundational rule for the evaluation of legal texts should consider—consider—whether and how AI-powered large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude might—might—inform the interpretive analysis.

There, having thought the unthinkable, I’ve said the unsayable.

It's controversial, even the judge's own analysis, and a far way from being the sole or primary controlling factor in most cases, but it demonstrates the sort of Deep Problems that can arise when problems (eg the adversarial potential) are overlooked.

Yeah, the only reason they had the challenge system was the recognition that human line judges would make mistakes. There's no point getting an electronic system to review itself

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