[BlakeSimpson]

It blows my mind that a lawyer would go through all the schooling and DEBT just to use ChatGPT and risk losing their BAR card.

Sure, I see plenty of uses for ChatGPT in their field, but to not even check the output before submitting it is what blows my mind.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It shouldn't be so mindblowing. People are lazy and dumb, as much so as they're allowed to be. We're a year away from this tech being completely mainstream to the point where we'll find out what happens when an entire society at once stops trying to think/work because there's a machine to do it for them now.

[xen2xen1]

If they used ChatGPT to find real cases that's not lazy, that's smart. The dumb and lazy part was NOT CHECKING ON THE NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR SOMETHING YOU SENT TO A JUDGE. Sorry for the caps, but so, so stupid. IIRC they asked ChatGPT if it lied, and it said no..

[elforce002]

This. We thought that it was bad enough when people used google to diagnose themselves. We're entering uncharted territory now.

[Ekaros]

Before it was handful of mad people with things like sovereign citizen and stupid instructions on Internet. But now it seems even trained folks will follow whatever something they have not verified says...

Also I wonder how well the training data was cleaned from all potentially harmful stuff like for example the sovereign citizen ideas...

[themaninthedark]

And this is exactly why I don't think Communism will work.

[dennis_jeeves1]

>completely mainstream to the point where we'll find out what happens when an entire society at once stops trying to think/work

You really need not wait that far if you have been observant enough, they are they were at one point clownish enough to believe in religion, now the vast majority of them believe in 'science' etc. Over reliance on Chat GPT is just the one of the newest manifestation of laziness and dumbness.

[hospitalJail]

They didn't know it could lie?

But also, pretty sure Doctors and Lawyers are among the least trusted/highest corruption professions. All that schooling is a barrier to entry to keep outsiders away, it doesnt guarantee competence. Basically once you get in, graduation rates are close to 100%.

[sarchertech]

You’re very wrong about the perception of doctors. According to polls, doctors are the 2nd most trusted profession. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388649/military-brass-judges-am...

My wife runs the resident eduction for her division and they are very aware of the dangers of sending an incompetent doctor out into the world to practice. They’ll force them through extra training and make them repeat residency if they have to.

Residents also drop out of their programs and move into other ones. It’s rare for them to drop out completely because they’d still be on the hook for $200k+ in loans. But medicine is a big field and it’s rare that someone who made it into and through med school to not be able to find something they are competent and capable at. Maybe you’re not great with patients, but you can look through a microscope all day as a pathologist etc…

Incompetent and corrupt doctors still make it through the process of course, but far far fewer than in our profession and just about any other profession I can think of.

As for lawyers:

Law schools have around a 77% graduation rate nation wide. And about 90% of law school graduates eventually pass the bar exam.

So we’re look at somewhere around 70% of people making it through after a pretty selective filter to begin with.

[droopyEyelids]

Everyone is piling onto you here, but another aspect is that many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them.

With that information I think it's less mind-blowing, they were simply assuming ChatGPT could do the work of a paralegal

[dctoedt]

> many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them.

If you mean that some lawyers use paralegals to do word searches for potentially-relevant case law (i.e., published judicial opinions as precedents), that might be true. But in my experience, good lawyers either do the raw research themselves, or at a minimum they use junior lawyers to do the initial searching for precedents; then if necessary, they do supplemental searching themselves, based on their greater experience.

[xen2xen1]

I've worked with legal software professionally a few times, and kept thinking software won't replace lawyers, it'll replace paralegals. Not all, but a great deal of grunt work could be replaced with AI and good forms. Now if we could get them not to lie?

[lotsofpulp]

> risk losing their BAR card.

Did they risk it? Even after it being obvious the lawyer was lying and trying to cover up, and not acquiescing to their wrongdoing even after all of it, all they had to pay was $5k.

[filoleg]

> all they had to pay was $5k.

They still risk being disbarred (not just hypothetically, it might actually happen) + taking a massive hit to the reputation (their own + the firm). The latter one alone is a strong punishment, given how widely-publicized this incident was in the media. It cost the firm a lot of potential clients, and the lawyer might struggle with finding a decent position after the fact (given how much more reputation-based the legal field seems to be compared to something like engineering).

[smcl]

Do we know for sure that absolutely no further action is being taken? I really don't know processes, so I dunno if this is it or if this is just one of the consequences, and that the bar association (is that the right org?) they're part of would want to weigh in on it.

[jrm4]

Well, one thing is that "law" was often the "field-of-choice" for the well-schooled who didn't know where to go next?

Now many, if not likely most, of the well-schooled are generally intelligent, but of course there are also quite a few rich idiots as well.

(Today, of course, most of the latter go into tech.)