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Comment by notavalleyman | Hacker News Reader

> Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said.

Seems like they still don't get it.

It's not good faith representation of your client, it's not good lawyering to interrogate a chatbot for your case. Even if it could somehow only ever tell the truth.

It's not a "good faith mistake" - so I think they still don't understand the problem here.

It might be representative of greater society: when people interact with ChatGPT, they treat it as an oracle. I see it all the time on r/chatgpt - people say, "I asked ChatGPT about my long lost grandparent whose life I am researching. Apparently my grandma was a pilot!"

Seems like the lawyers are shocked the oracle lied but still think they were right to consult it.

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> Seems like they still don't get it.

Oh they get it. ChatGPT explained it to them, and then suggested that they take this position because it was the least bad option.

Right. They aren't completely finished with potential punishments. A review by the Bar is likely still ongoing. They can't do anything but pretend it was all done in good faith. Much like a person or company who may end up in a lawsuit can't issue a "real" apology when they screw up lest it be used against them.

I bet a beer they came up with this defense line with a help of gpt.

The risk of ChatGPT is not that people take it seriously, since no-one does even those lawyers; The risk is that it is becomes acceptable to pretend to not understand the shortcomings of ChatGPT, and pretend that it does not make the person an irresponsible adult.

Like editing Wikipedia then citing the contents. Impossible to defend in good faith, but passes as a legit excuse in a public court.

Some people really know how to use public naivety to enforce the public’s powerlessness.

Wikipedia is (almost always) not a citable source. Everyone who knows what "citing a source" is (including Wikipedia itself) knows that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

Sure, we all do it informally, but implicit in that is that you should check the real sources if you care about accuracy.

The cynic in me thinks they do get it and that their statement is an excuse to save face. It’s easier to blame technology instead of admit they wanted to cut corners.

Are we all using the same definition of "good faith"? That just means to deal honestly and sincerely without any intent to defraud, deceive, or harm the other party.

I don't see any proof that shows they intended to deceive rather than that they were clueless.

This right here is what people are overlooking in their contempt.

The attorney used it as a research tool, and even foolishly thought to use it to validate that it wasn't making shit up. It's a really embarrassing mistake that's only obvious in the eyes of people familiar with the technology. There is nothing about this that suggests they intended to deceive, only intent to be a lazy idiot.

When your job consists of not being 'a lazy idiot', being one is nothing short of bad faith behaviour.

Oh boy, no wonder we invented religion.

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