If you haven’t been following along with the ChatGPT / Robot Lawyer discourse on Twitter, here’s the TLDR:
A few weeks ago, Josh Browder of Do Not Pay announced that they were hatching a plot to have a self-represented person in traffic court wear AirPods and receive instructions about what to say from ChatGPT.
Today, we learned that this experiment would not get to the “Find Out” stage of the FAFO cycle.
There was a lot of hand-wringing and gleeful mockery by the legal community prior to this, most of which I think was not misplaced but misdirected. The best and most thoughtful analysis (pre AirPods stunt) is from Josh King, and you should read it.
My initial thoughts were:
No one actually makes legal arguments in traffic court. We’re talking civil traffic court, where the issues are “oh so you can prove how fast I was going,” “is the officer going to show up,” and “can I keep the points off my license.” Not sure how ChatGPT was going to even come into play here.
Attorneys look kind of like assholes for ridiculing every tech solution that tries to help people without lawyers, especially because those same attorneys don’t try and help those same people.
This is actually one of those “no such thing as bad press” things for Browder, who got way more attention from the announcement than actually using ChatGPT in a courtroom.
This is a very bad sideshow distracting from the fact that we’re getting very close to having AI make a meaningful impact in A2J. This tweet puts it better:
And so it goes.
Ultimately the thing that I think really should have shut the whole experiment down was the (unconfirmed) revelation that the person intending to use ChatGPT was a sovereign citizen:
If you’re not familiar with sovereign citizens, lucky you. Every lawyer who spent time in the prosecutor’s or public defender’s office is intimately aware of this brand of awful litigious and painful people. Imagine if the worst posts on r/legaladvice were combined with a brainworms conspiracy theory involving the Uniform Commercial Code and whether or not a U.S. flag has fringe on it, and then distilled into a fury of crazed arguments and pointless motions. Sovereign citizens are the people who sue the traffic court judge for RICO in federal court when they’re forced to pay a speeding ticket. No amount of generic AI is going to put a lid on that insanity.
Ultimately I think Browder et al would have done a lot better here if the lawyers in his startup had actually been in misdemeanor and traffic court a few times, instead of just doing 12 months of M&A work after graduating from Harvard. Maybe subject matter expertise matters.
Another very good tweet about ChatGPT:
And the best one: