Technology

AI in the legal field could be useful for assisting an actual legal professional in compiling precedent based against on-the-books laws, so long as it cites sources and they verify them.

In the medical field, it could be useful for spotting anomalies between multiple images such as X-rays or cross-referencing medical documents WHEN USED BY A PROFESSIONAL.

But the thing is, it should be a tool - carefully used - to enhance the existing profession, not replace actual professionals.

I mean.

Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?

[Edit: if you are downvoting this, downvote away, but you owe an argument below as to why. I promise this exact argument will come up in the courts over this issue]

Mixed feelings about this. Let me play devils advocate and say that many Americans don’t have access to these resources at all. Having potentially inaccurate resources might be better than nothing, or is that worse?

If you don't want legal or medical advice from an AI, you can already simply not ask the AI for legal or medical advice. But I don't want your paternalistic restrictions on what I may ask.

I'm not sure I totally agree with this, even as much as I want AI companies to be held accountable for things like that.

The reason so many people turn to LLMs for legal/medical advice is because those are both incredibly unaffordable, complex, hard to parse fields.

If I ask an LLM what x symptom, y symptom, and z symptom could mean, and it cites multiple reputable sources to tell me it's probably the flu and tells me to mask up for a bit, that's probably gonna be better than that person being told "I'm sorry, I can't answer that"

At the same time, I might provide an LLM with all those symptoms, and it might hallucinate an answer and tell me I have cancer, or tell me to inject bleach to cure myself.

I feel like I'd much rather see a bill that focuses more on how the LLMs come to their conclusions, rather than just a blanket ban.

Like for example, if an LLM cites multiple medical journals, government health websites, etc, and provides the same information they had up, but it turns out to be wrong later because those institutions were wrong, would it be justified to sue the LLM company for someone else's accidental misinformation?

But if an LLM pulls from those sources, gets most of it right, but comes to a faulty conclusion, then should a private right of action exist?

I'm not really sure myself to be honest. A lot of people rely on LLMs for their information now, so just blanket banning them from displaying certain information, for a lot of people, is just gonna be "you can't know", and they're not gonna bother with regular searches anymore. To them, the chatbot IS the search engine now.