Introducing the World's Most Advanced Chatbot Lawyer | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the World's Most Advanced Chatbot Lawyer

lawbot.info

23 pointsjonbaer28 comments

LawBot: Hi, I'm LawBot, a robot lawyer designed to help you through this situation. Please tell me your name or say anonymous if you would rather not.

You: i was arrested for public urination

LawBot: Nice to meet you, i was arrested for public urination. I can help you understand if you have been the victim of a sex offence, a property offence, physical or psychological injury, or harassment. If you don't understand what I am saying, just say so and I will explain. If you don't understand a word, just ask me about it and I will give you a definition. Would you like to get started?

You: i was arrested for public urination

LawBot: Please describe briefly in one sentence what happened to you. Try to use words that people usually use when speaking about this issue to help me understand you.

You: i was arrested

LawBot: Sorry, could you try to explain that in a different way? Maybe be more specific about the incident?

Can you try being arrested for a different crime?

"Could you dumb it down a little?"

And "founders" keep saying chatbot is the future of the world!!1! They should stop embarassing themselves.

I barely understand the chat bots hype around these days. They all remind me of Clippy [1] and are especially ineffective when it comes to complicated interaction.

1 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

It's not even a lawyer; it sounds more like a police prosecutor.

Saying that it's 'the World's Most Advanced Chatbot Lawyer' sounds like an outright lie in every way. It only helps plaintiffs, not defendants - It's a prosecutor.

> LawBot Too much recursion in AIML

I got this several times, once when asking about the definition of a term ("psychological injury") and again when trying to get information about harassment crimes. Seems more like an alpha so far...

The chatbot should probably make clear up-front that all information provided (1) does not constitute legal advice, and (2) is all based on the laws of a certain jurisdiction (presumably somewhere in the UK). Otherwise people might think that the information provided is relevant to them when it isn't actually. I don't know if it provides disclaimers later in the process because I kept getting errors before any advice was given.

Lastly, this looks to be run completely by law and other students. They should probably have some actual lawyers involved to make sure that (1) their analyses are correct, and (2) they aren't running afoul of laws regarding providing legal advice. It would probably also make people feel more comfortable using the tool.

Jesus crap, they're using AIML and claiming this is the world's most advanced anything?

AIML is an old framework for writing rule-based chatbots. It's a generalization of Eliza.

LawBot: Sorry, I don't understand. Say 'crime' to start over, 'glossary' for definitions, or 'instructions' if I'm being complicated.

You: crime

LawBot: A crime is anything that a person does that will lead to a criminal conviction.

The sass.

LawBot: Were you caused physical harm?

hmm, 2 comments in and I'm confused...

https://popehat.com/2016/10/26/if-lawbot-wants-to-know-about...

"The world's most advanced"? WTF Bullshit is that. It's just a fucking decision tree, and not a very good one on top of that!

Seriously, title is complete clickbait

Absolutely.

Their team appears to be all law students. No technical talent in sight.

Services like this are 100% useless because it is impossible for the user to verify that the software has (1) accurately interpreted the question and (2) accurately answered the question.

When you try for some time, it eventually does what it should try to do since the start, given that NLP is not easy and not needed in this case: it starts to ask you questions with a fixed set of possible replies in order to narrow the case to a set of pre-existing possibilities.

Agreed, the chatbot facade slows it down, it's a simple decision tree that could be handled with a few checkboxes and conditional display.

I tried "I got arrested for drunk driving" 3 or 4 times in a row and never got any reasonable response. If a lawbot can't help with "DUI" or a more common phrasing, it should at least recognize it.

I'm surprised it's not illegal for them to claim this bot is a "lawyer". Usually it seems like people are very careful about that, and clearly the bot wouldn't pass any bar exam.

I think it is. Just wait for someone to sue their ass.

I've seen several articles recently saying that chatbots are The Next Big Thing. I just don't get it. Every chatbot I've ever used reminds me of playing those text-based adventure games, where you need to rephrase your question several times to get the outcome you want.

I find it hard to imagine a situation where a chatbot would help me find the information I need faster than a nice structured menu layout or a good search engine.

Am I missing something?

You

My car was stolen

LawBot

Sorry, could you try to explain that in a different way? Maybe be more specific about the incident?

----

I may not be a native English speaker but come on, isn't that wording pretty clear?

It seems better at generating unintentional dad jokes than giving legal advice:

http://0bin.net/paste/rBkOCw5hi2sAdvPx#5e1Be08sJSV9sFCWTbS2D...

It advised me to go a police station 8000 km away. That's the closest one it could find.

Well, given that this is the World's Most Advanced, I would like to see some sample conversations with the less advanced ones.

Oh, is this the Bob Loblaw Lawbot? Didn't read about it in Bob Loblaw's Lawblog.

Me: She groped me. LawBot: Did she have a pen*s?

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