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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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This is a great point. LLM's are changing the game in a big way and it's hard to see where it ends.

Corporate lawyers have often used the equivalent of a denial-of-service attack to overwhelm smaller opponents. You are ordered to turn in documents, so you turn in 1 million pages and laugh because there's no way your opponent can read them at $500/hour.

Of course, the natural end game is that all law is done by LLMs. O1 is arguably already superhuman at parsing large documents. Recently, there was a bogus scientific study about plastic from cooking spatulas causing negative health effects. It turns out the authors made an order-of-magnitude error in a basic calculation. It was missed by human reviewers. Someone ran it through O1. It found the error immediately.

Lawyers defend obfuscation because it places them at the top of a power hierarchy. But this will change. Soon. The future is LLMs that chow through a MILLION pages in a few hours, with superhuman patience and memory.

All in all, shorter and simpler is better. Warren Buffett has bought billion dollar companies with a 1 page contract. Lawyers think they need 1000 pages. Well I'm here to tell you that we can make a MILLION page contract. So now lawyers need to make the argument "the contract needs to be short enough for me to parse, but too long for you to parse". Good luck.

Of course, the natural end game is that all law is done by LLMs. O1 is arguably already superhuman at parsing large documents. Recently, there was a bogus scientific study about plastic from cooking spatulas causing negative health effects. It turns out the authors made an order-of-magnitude error in a basic calculation. It was missed by human reviewers. Someone ran it through O1. It found the error immediately.

I have a great pitch for AI proofing internal communications, all intra-business e-mail is done over a synthetic language which features N-words and other verboten lingo and concepts by the current regime. Lets see them use AI to disentangle that which they have worked so hard to censor.

Most SPAs are long because you want to force the other side to disclose so you make them rep to certain things.

There is also some legalese.

There is also some legalese.

There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.

"You write it up all nice and fine, and I’ll sign it."

Few things fit the midwit meme greater than people who are obsessed with "legalese". They view it like a talisman that can protect them from evil forces. But nothing can.

LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today. They probably deserve it.

It really is funny. As a lawyer, I laugh when people try to write something formal and start throwing around “big words.”

I’m not a lawyer, but I am extremely suspicious about claims of the form “oh yeah [X profession] is a bunch of bullshit, it’s actually really simple and easy but they make it more complicated than it has to be”, because people say it about my own profession (programming) all the time in cases where I know it to be false.

Do you have any examples of legalese that you think could be profitably and straightforwardly simplified?

There's a plausible argument that legalese is like a ceremony where you slaughter a cow and then look at the entrails to take the omens. It makes people feel that ceremonies were observed while having no effect on on the actual outcome. It works especially well on people who are a little dim.

In my experience, the legalese is there not for the people actually signing the contract, but instead for the people trying to resolve disputes about the contract years down the line. You're not trying to snow the other side; you're trying to get the completely unrelated judge or future lawyer to take your side in the future. Many of the strange phrasings are references to standard language which can be reliably interpreted in a particular way so long as the standard remains current, or attempts to cover every possible base and contingency.

LLMs are going to gish gallop the shit out of every lawyer alive today

It's not the lawyers you need to gish gallop, it's the judges. And if you do that, you're not going to like the results. You want courts to be predictable.

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