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  • This is also another obvious example of misalignment on the part of ChatGPT. If the thing had any semblance of an actual system of ethics, or emulation thereof, it would refuse requests to try to make facts fit a predetermined conclusion. In a legal case, no less!
  • If you let your legal process decide based on rhetoric, you'll have people use AI to generate rhetoric.
  • I find it very interesting that, from what I understand, the LLM use isn’t actually what’s at issue. It’s really just that he worked backwards, beginning with a conclusion and attempting to find evidence towards that end. The LLM chat logs are just a uniquely astounding piece of evidence towards his incompetence.
    by jscd
  • The article is pay walled.. Does it explain why the expert witness shared screenshots of these prompts? Voluntarily or required to?
    by fblp
  • from the point of view of the judge and society, i guess, what matters, ultimately, is whether the arguments presented for a case hold, not where did they come from -- so it shouldn't matter if ChatGPT was the one that came up with the argument if the argument is good. though one could point out that if one particular method of generating arguments tends to generate arguments that take time to analyse but are often enough pointless, we'd save time by not using them.

    so assuming that the report will be analysed on its own merits, really, it was 3M who got scammed here, because they paid $475/hr for a guy that was just prompting ChatGPT. i mean, i don't know much about the subject, but that screenshot of the gas detector with the "what am i looking at here"... wow, it looks like i already know enough to be an expert witness. no wonder these people are so drawn to stuff like positive affirmations, when they do make it by faking it.

  • My father was an expert witness in construction defect and he told me about some of the times he was hired to produce a report about the causes of some defect or failure and that sometimes the entity that hired him was at fault. He usually wasn't retained for trial in those cases, but it earned him a reputation for honesty.

    Seeing these pay-for-opinion "experts" fills me with a deep disgust.

  • How it is made should be irrelevant in the process. There is no way to stop people using LLM’s or other tools to create products like this report.

    It should be globally a standard check to verify incoming documents and to determine their validity.

    The interesting part on this case is that we see the real human aspect of it. Just asking for a report only finding the positive facts instead of doing real research.

    That is an ethics question. When behaving like this (and it happened before LLM’s) it should be seen as an ethics violation. If not done there is no value in those legal procedures anymore.

    The facts people have to accept is that the only place to check this is the deliverable. They are lucky now to have found the source, the prompts and the background but so many reports are entered without being so obvious.

    It’s a terribly huge and complicated task.

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Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault" · Birbla