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Comment by bdonlan | Hacker News Reader

Link appears to be broken.

``` All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being. These platforms are incredibly powerful and have many uses in the law: form divorces, discovery requests, suggested errors in documents, anticipated questions at oral argument. But legal briefing is not one of them. Here’s why. These platforms in their current states are prone to hallucinations and bias. On hallucinations, they make stuff up—even quotes and citations. Another issue is reliability or bias. While attorneys swear an oath to set aside their personal prejudices, biases, and beliefs to faithfully uphold the law and represent their clients, generative artificial intelligence is the product of programming devised by humans who did not have to swear such an oath. As such, these systems hold no allegiance to any client, the rule of law, or the laws and Constitution of the United States (or, as addressed above, the truth). Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to computer code rather than conviction, based on programming rather than principle. Any party believing a platform has the requisite accuracy and reliability for legal briefing may move for leave and explain why. Accordingly, the Court will strike any filing from an attorney who fails to file a certificate on the docket attesting that the attorney has read the Court’s judge-specific requirements and understands that he or she will be held responsible under Rule 11 for the contents of any filing that he or she signs and submits to the Court, regardless of whether generative artificial intelligence drafted any portion of that filing. ```

> While attorneys swear an oath to set aside their personal prejudices, biases, and beliefs to faithfully uphold the law and represent their clients, generative artificial intelligence is the product of programming devised by humans who did not have to swear such an oath.

While I like the idea, the reasoning here is kinda silly, even if some developer had sworn such an oath it is entirely unclear how that should affect a AI. We just don't have good techniques to prevent llms from hallucinating.

Not just the developer, but anyone who posted any sort of text in the training data. I assume that includes a pretty wide majority of English speakers. That makes the likelihood of actual agreement with the oath for all “participants” in the AI training low, to say the least.

That point about swearing an oath is a good one. It’s a reasonable position (assuming it’s the court’s position) that an AI (assuming this is an “AI”) being asked to provide testimony or a legal argument is doing so on behalf of all who trained it. Why would “my” training argue in “your” case? What if one doesn’t agree with the oath?

the hallucination issue was a separate clause. the court does not think that so swearing will fix hallucinations.

That's surprisingly well informed about tech for a judge.

One of hardest, time consuming, and most important parts of being a judge is understanding the issues presented before you. Be it generative AI or communal animal husbandry.

There are clearly gross examples of judges failing in this duty, but others take that duty extremely seriously and I've read a number of judicial opinions on technology-related cases that demonstrated remarkable, nuanced grokking of the matter at hand.

Works for me, but you can also read the text of the order here: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/30/federal-judge-requires-...

(The linked blog post is where I discovered this, but I submitted the original source instead.)

In federal courts, when you file something under your account (often, attorneys have staff do the clicking to file), it is the equivalent of signing. And what you sign, you vouch for.

This standing order reiterates what any practitioner _should_ know. It a rule which states that you should follow the rules! But as we learned from the Air Avianca filing, at least one lawyer is missing something very basic about what it means to sign a filing in federal court.

Works for me too. Nice to see some judges have integrity.

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