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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> It’s more likely that the AI would free up public defendants from things like having to answer their clients’ questions, as they could just ask the AI, allowing them to be more effective

Public defenders would be more effective if they didn't have to talk to their clients?

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I read it more as, clients have a mix of questions. Clients don’t go through the system everyday and likely have some general worries and procedural questions as a result. Clients also have a case and need to coordinate with their lawyer. AI could enable more of the latter to happen within the limited time the lawyer has for each client.

Seems like that problem could be fixed by giving clients a brochure and a video to watch that explains everything.

Sorry, I can’t ever write clearly on the phone, this site is very mobile-unfriendly. I meant that defendants would be able to talk to the AI about their case to learn as much as they want. A public defender can’t commit that much time to each of their cases.

The problem with this is "how do you assure the AI isn't bold face lying to the defendant".

For a natural text generation/chat system like ChatGPT, at the moment this is effectively impossible and frankly I don't see it being sufficiently fixed for something as complex as teaching law to a non-law-student any time in the near future.

I think these discussions always seem focused on the ideal state of the "AI is perfect and gives correct answers" and not the current state where the "AI constructs sentences that are structured correctly, but are filled with inaccuracies and illogical nonsense."

If we want to steelman AI why shouldn’t we also steelman the court system? Assuming a perfect AI is about the same as assuming a well functioning court system. Otherwise we should be assuming a flawed, potentially racist, confidently incorrect AI vs a flawed, excessively slow, definitely racist court system.

I don't see how it's the same.

So you make this as understood as possible and the lawyer can fill in the gaps and clarify.

It's not like a "jailhouse lawyer" will do any better. Though it might cost something you didn't expect, such as a new witness against you or a shower pal.

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