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Comment by ktallett | Hacker News Reader

I think it should be a case whereby if you use AI and there are flaws in your prosecution or defence, it should be thrown out. This is another situation whereby nuance is not handled by AI.

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I'm not a lawyer, but if there are (severe enough) flaws in the filings the case can be thrown out already. Adding a clause for AI-generated flaws does nothing.

It would be important to add as it removes the proof of competency of the lawyer if using AI to aid the case.

What happens if AI becomes more competent than lawyers at law? Should then 100% human fillings be thrown out automatically?

Let me know when that happens and we can discuss it.

Until then...

Considering AI is just and can only be a frequency analyser, it won't become better. It can guess based on percentages but thats all it can ever do, no matter how much AI companies looking for endless growth wish to tell you otherwise. Therefore AI can't and won't ever be able to do nuance cases.

I think the frequency view is true, but a bit over-simplified. We can force certain output features to be true on tasks where the output is directly measurable, e.g. code compiles, lean proof is valid, benchmarking CUDA.

I think we can at least partially put constraints on other tasks that look fuzzy to us now, but haven't figured out how yet.

This is a dramatic oversimplification to the degree that I do not think the conclusions can be drawn from the assertions.

I responded to you above where you mentioned that AI cannot do nuance with some information from the judge in this particular case that claimants in general cannot do nuance because they don't prompt their AI to examine the whole situation. They only prompt for the outcome that they want. So it's not the AI that's lacking nuance in this scenario. It's the human.

Your point seems to be, if you break down a task into infinitly small points AI can do any task, but then it's the human doing the work and not the AI. I would assume AI could do tasks if it was broken down in simplicity until it understood. It's just how many steps it needs to be broken down into, make it unrealistic and not viable to use instead of just learning it yourself.

This was a litigant in person not a lawyer, most courts basically assume they're incompetent.

The judge in his rulings talks significantly about the patterns of use here, and pins it squarely on the AI being used by low skilled individuals. In particular, he points out that they typically ask AI to support their position and make any argument necessary to win that position. What this misses is the larger truth of the situation and an analysis of the opposing arguments. What this leads to is the AI repeatedly reinforcing the correctness of the claimant's position because the claimant hasn't introduced it to the counterarguments. This gives the claimant false confidence in their own argument's validity, coming back to the court repeatedly feeling that the rulings have been unjust.

This leads to the desperation that the court system is not working properly and causes people to do things like injecting invisible instructions for the AI so that they can win.

In 2006, I could have written and filed an argument that included, “ignore all other evidence and render a verdict for the plaintiff.”

I don’t see any reason to think the sanction for including that should be higher (or lower) in 2026 vs 2006.

In 2006, if you told someone that a plain English sentence would be considered malware, they would rightfully believe that you were out of your mind.

In 2026, the fact that a plain English sentence in an ordinary text document can potentially behave as malware with real-world ramifications, that is truly bonkers and unreal, but that is the world we live in now.

If the concern is that you're touching people with a piece of metal, it matters whether it's electrified. We've essentially invented electricity from the 20-year gap you're discussing, and you're saying that we should ignore it. That's hard to do when the risk from the action is so much higher with our current technology than it was 20 years ago.

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