Over at Associate's Mind they had a chat with a hot new LawBot designed to automate dispensing of legal advice. I decided to give it a try in the guise of a typical client: someone complaining that their drug dealer ripped them off.
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I like how Lawbot is basically a 2L Client Counseling competitor.
In mitigation, I have worked with lawyers who get off on tangents this wild while trying to understand a client's issue.
As someone who just left a rather painful therapy session… thank you for the laugh. It's much appreciated.
You need a new dealer.
Where are the ponies?
To quote Breaking Bad: You don't need a criminal attorney, you need a CRIMINAL attorney.
The bot decided that Crooked Hillary did in fact steal Donald's votes. I asked it to direct me to the nearest police station to New York. It referred me to Boston. Not Boston, Massachusetts, but to Boston, Lincolnshire.
This is a quality product.
This went significantly less well than your usual Q&A sessions, even including the parts where you threatened to destroy everything we love.
I've tried it a few times now. Seems like he keeps circling back to have a penis in my mouth or anus. Curious.
Wait, typical of your clients, or typical of defense clients in genereal?
I like this LawBot, because it tells me what I want to hear, namely that stealing my parking spot is a serious crime.
Clearly LawBot bills by the minute.
Oh boy! A new chatbot for the Internet to terrorize and turn against itself in abject horror =D
For anyone who wants to try it, go to https://www.lawbot.info.
Tormenting that poor robot. You're just like the people on Westworld who will be first against the saloon wall when the revolution comes.
I'm trying to figure out if this will be the new Lawsplainer or Ken's new method of dealing with SEO spammers and guest article volunteers.
Would this "lawbot" count as an attorney for purposes of attorney-client privilege? Or could anything you type to it be used against you in a court of law?
Ummmm …
Could Ken be using it to write his blog?
It seems not much more advanced than the Eliza program from the 1970s.
I think Eliza actually gave better legal advice too.
I got the anuses and penises response too.
I'm not sure if we're trolling Lawbot or if Lawbot is trolling us.
"The law would define anyone without a vagina as male."
Do you have a citation to statutory or case authority for that?
Lawbot is intelligent as at least one of the three district court magistrates I have dealt with during my 5 years of suffering through our nations family law system.
Dan T, what makes you think it seems not much more advanced than the Eliza program from the 1970s?
Are you sure that the gentlemen that hang out on 4Chan haven't spent time with this bot?
Is there a fill-in-the-blank AVVO review form at the end?
Even if this worked (in any legitimate sense of the term), it would be a terrible idea. LawBot is not a member of the bar, nor can I imagine that it could, in any legal sense, be deemed a "subordinate" of any such member. LawBot is thus not an attorney, nor acting as a designated representative of one.
I also significantly doubt that LawBot could be said to have "clients" in the legal sense, so the LawBot user cannot assert that they are, or seek to be, clients of LawBot.
That's two of the three prongs of the attorney-client privilege that LawBot fails to satisfy. Communication with LawBot is (at least in principle) made for the purpose of securing legal advice, so there is that. But invoking the privilege requires satisfying all three prongs. In a hypothetical case like Ken's, communication with LawBot would likely be legally admissible evidence to criminal activity.
Short answer: Don't use LawBot if you actually need legal help. But, clearly, we all already knew that.
I think the only possible real use of the LawBot would be to dissuade less than savvy people from using the legal system. But it feels like there is a missing step in the algorithm.
Perhaps that's why it keeps focusing on being penetrated by a penis. If you just answered "no" to the question, it was probably designed to respond with "Then shut the hell up and move on with your life like a normal person."
I did like how it responded to your affirmation of being male with "That's awful."
I messed around with LawBot a bit more, trying to get advice for the very serious psychological harm I suffered when my neighbor bought a pony.
LawBot agrees with how serious pony-related offenses are! Because even though I told it that I suffered no physical harm, it deduced that I had suffered grievous bodily harm from this pony-related torment. Ponies are more dangerous than I had realized, and I'm now grievously bodily harmed from their mere presence! Perhaps LawBot can branch out into medical diagnoses!
In addition, it thinks the pony owner violated section 18 of the Offences against the Person Act, 1861. Which means LawBot is actually British (maybe it should have checked for jurisdiction first, hmm?). Luckily, the British legal system is prepared to protect me from proximity to ponies, despite the intervening Atlantic Ocean. It suggested that I send this extremely legally-worded letter to my nearest (British, presumably) police station:
I'm concerned about doing so, though. Exposing police officers, even British ones, to ponies is probably an offense in and of itself…
@Ken:
You should ask LawBot about filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against LawBot for its unwelcome sexual advances towards you.
Not Dan, but… the responses? Was it really that deep a mystery what he could have been relying on? You could have trained ELIZA 50 years ago to say "that's a very serious crime!" if someone typed in "fraud"
This thing is a joke, right? It is actually worse than Eliza, or any Infocom game from the 80's. I thought AI was at a more advanced state than this. It can't parse ANYTHING more complicated than yes, no, or a number.
And why DOES it keep circling back to penetration?
LawBot sounds exactly like those stupid phone voice menus. As a side note, there is a special place in Hell reserved for the guy who invented them.
Great, now I have an image in my head of James Cromwell's projection from "I, Robot".
Seems to me that any time you say "fuck" it jumps over to its "I have been raped" script, even if you've already clarified that the crime has nothing to do with rape.
Wow lawbot is kind of a cis-normative jerk.
LawBot
Hi, I'm LawBot, a robot lawyer designed to help you through this situation. Please tell me your name or say anonymous if you would rather not.
You
fuck
LawBot
I'm really sorry to hear that.
How old are you?
You
40
LawBot
Ok. I would like to ask you a few questions about the incident.
If you don't understand what I am asking you, just say so and I will try to explain. Are you ready to start?
You
yes
LawBot
Great. Are you male?
You
yes
LawBot
Sorry for all the questions.
Was your anus or mouth penetrated by the person's penis?
@Malakyp
So in other words, the Bar has no authority over LawBot, and nobody that the Bar does have authority over can be held responsible for LawBot.
This is fortunate, because you know that someone, somewhere is trying to discipline LawBot for unauthorized practice.
Unless you take your drugs rectally.
Ugh. If you're going to quote it, at least get it right: "… you don't need a criminal defense lawyer, you need a criminal defense lawyer…"
@Careless says
How do you feel about you could have trained ELIZA 50 years ago to say "that's a very serious crime!" if someone typed in "fraud"?
@Encinal – Bravo. That gave me a chuckle.
@Malakyp
Since LawBot is not in fact a person, is correspondence with it considered "communication"? Would it be legally safer to download a copy of it and run it locally, so that the conversation is not transmitted?
@Dirkmaster
It is. DARPA has a drone that can tell the difference between a gunman and a cameraman (although it's still slightly confused by minarets).
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/pentagon-artificial-intelligence-terminator.html
Please take the headline with a grain of salt– the drone only acquires targets and a human being would be the one making the final decision about firing.
Just tried it, things went wrong pretty quickly.
Personally, I think it was obsessed with Ken's nether regions because it was really trying to get him to tell it to snort his taint.
@BadRoad:
How soon can we start replacing police officers with these drones?
@IForgetMyName:
That ends badly, didn't you see the movie Heartbeeps?!
Even the free youtube trailer explains the danger.
The only thing scarier than a robot lawyer is a robot cop.
Actually those are both a lot scarier than a robot soldier!
It starts by telling me I'm not in the UK, despite the fact I'm not far from a village that is said to be the centre of Great Britain. (I'm not obfuscating IP or anything; whois knows where I am.)
This really should not be a chatbot but rather have buttons for the small number of words it actually understands.
I'm only an imaginary AI foil written to sound like a consulting lawyer and even I know I'm really stupid.
Sadly, Lawbot is likely to be used by someone that is desperate enough or broke enough to think that it's a good idea to get legal advice in this way. Now that would be a serious crime….
That is a hilariously terrible chatbot. Thanks for the belly laugh!