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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

> I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?

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You pay the human because you assume they take responsibility in this being correct. If they literally copy-paste without checking they are no better than AI. In fact they may be worse.

My comment was not intended to express support of using AI instead of lawyers, but rather to express the pointlessness of "disrupting" human lawyers.

If they literally copy-paste without checking and it turns out the AI was wrong and you suffer harm from that you can sue the lawyer for malpractice.

If the human lawyer doesn’t proofread it, whats the point’s the point of a human lawyer? Scapegoat for the AI?

Yes, lawyers have ethical and legal responsibility for their work. Plus, I'd prefer that my money not go towards the consolidation and monopolization of all intellectual labor in the hands of Sam Altman.

I think this concern is not really reasonable given that there are a vast array of LLMs, now including completely open weight frontier tier models. The valuations of certain companies is nothing but a bubble. What logic exists for it is probably in one part praying for a government granted monopoly, and in part relying on the LLM companies being deemed too big to fail when the bubble bursts. The latter part is also probably true, and a yet another good reason that too big to fail is the dumbest logic ever - rather than protecting the economy, it directly drives self destructive behavior.

Except you probably pay cents in tokens for that, or included with your sub.

The business plan of any "disruption" is to undercut the legacy competitors, drive them out of business, then jack up the prices. See also: Uber, streaming services.

Enjoy your cheap lawyer tokens while you can.

I mean that's just how life is? Exploit opportunities when they appear, find new ones when they run out.

In principle, that's fine, but "disruptive" businesses aren't building a positive long-term model. Rather, they are leveraging investors' money to recklessly demolish established systems and replace them with something worse.

Im a bit Darwinistic on this, like if a system can be disrupted easily, it means there are existing weaknesses that need to be addressed (taxis vs Uber, hotels vs Airbnb).

If the established system can adapt to the disruption, then as consumers we have more choices.

If the established system dies and the disruptor replaced it (DVD rental vs Netflix), then the disruptor, despite their weaknesses, do answer the consumer needs better.

If both the established and disruptive system dies, then maybe they're not that important in the first place.

Any system can be disrupted if you throw unlimited VC money at it.

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