Wednesday, December 13, 2023

How much gooder is faster? Where does the value lie?

https://www.bespacific.com/lawyering-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Choi, Jonathan H. and Monahan, Amy and Schwarcz, Daniel, Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (November 7, 2023). Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-31, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4626276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4626276 : “We conduct the first randomized controlled trial of AI assistance’s effect on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned sixty students at the University of Minnesota Law School each to complete four separate legal tasks (drafting a complaint, a contract, a section of an employee handbook, and a client memo), either with or without the assistance of GPT-4, after receiving training on how to use GPT-4 effectively. We then blind-graded the results and tracked how long the students took on each task. We found that access to GPT-4 slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. The benefits of AI assistance were not evenly distributed: in the tasks on which AI was the most useful, it was significantly more useful to lower-skilled participants. On the other hand, AI assistance reduced the amount of time that participants took to complete the tasks roughly uniformly regardless of their baseline speed. In follow up surveys, we found that participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and that they correctly predicted the tasks for which GPT-4 would be most helpful. These results—which will likely serve as a lower-bound estimate on AI’s capacity to improve the efficiency of legal services—have important normative implications across the future of lawyering. For law schools, they suggest the importance of deliberately and holistically assessing when and how law students are trained to use AI. For lawyers and judges, they suggest that the time to embrace AI is now, though the contours of what that will mean can and should vary significantly by practice area, task, and the stakes of the underlying matters. And for purchasers of legal services, our results suggest that it is time to reconsider what types of legal matters should be sent to outside counsel rather than handled in-house, and how matters that are handled externally are managed and billed.”





Wow? (Not enough AI lawyers?)

https://www.bespacific.com/googles-antitrust-loss-to-epic-could-preview-its-legal-fate-in-2024/

Google’s Antitrust Loss to Epic Could Preview Its Legal Fate in 2024

The New York Times: “Google’s loss was swift after a monthlong antitrust trial in a San Francisco federal court. A little more than three hours after a jury had begun deliberating on Monday, they returned with their verdict. There were 11 antitrust claims that Epic Games, the maker of the hit videogame Fortnite, had brought against Google’s Play Store for Android mobile devices, and the jury found Google to be at fault in every one of them. It was the first test of how Google might fare in the antitrust gauntlet it faces in the United States — and the company was routed. The courtroom loss could portend Google’s legal fate in two, more significant antitrust cases in the United States that could weaken the world’s most influential internet business and reshape the tech industry for years to come. Google will learn more about the direction the cases will take next year. In San Francisco, Judge James Donato of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide early in the year how Google should be punished for what the jury found to be anticompetitive conduct with its app store. Google and the Justice Department are expected to make closing arguments in May in a separate antitrust trial in Washington D.C., that focused on Google’s overwhelmingly popular search engine. And the company still faces another antitrust trial, regarding its online ad business, in a federal court in Virginia.”



(Related)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/12/tim-sweeney-why-epic-did-better-against-google-than-apple-in-court.html

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on why the company did better against Google than Apple in court

Sweeney attributed the win to revelations during the trial that Google had allegedly deleted or failed to keep records such as chats about its secretive deals with app makers. He also noted that it had been a jury trial, while the Apple case was decided by a judge.

The brazenness of Google executives violating the law, and then deleting all of the records of violating the law,” Sweeney said in an interview with CNBC. “That was really astonishing. This is very much not a normal court case, you don’t expect a trillion-dollar corporation to operate the way Google operated.”





Are you paying attention IRS?

https://therecord.media/ukraine-intelligence-claims-attack-on-russia-tax-service

Ukraine’s intelligence claims cyberattack on Russia’s state tax service

Ukraine's defense intelligence directorate (GUR) said it infected thousands of servers belonging to Russia's state tax service with malware, and destroyed databases and backups.

During the operation, Ukraine's military spies said they managed to break into one of the "key well-protected central servers" of Russia's federal tax service (FNS) as well as more than 2,300 regional servers throughout Russia and occupied Crimea. The attack also affected a Russian tech company that operates FNS’s database.

According to GUR’s statement published Tuesday, the attack led to the “complete destruction” of the agency’s infrastructure. GUR claimed they destroyed configuration files "which for years ensured the functioning of Russia's tax system."



(Related) In war, attacks go both ways...

https://therecord.media/kyivstar-cyberattack-telecom-shutdown-ukraine

Ukraine's largest telecom operator shut down after cyberattack

Ukraine’s largest telecom operator, Kyivstar, got hit by a major cyberattack on Tuesday, leaving millions of people without cell service and internet.

Kyivstar customers began complaining about network and internet outages in the early morning. The company later reported via Facebook that it got hit by a "powerful" cyberattack that led to a "large-scale technical failure." Customers' data hasn't been compromised, the statement said.

Kyivstar's services in Ukraine were still down as of Tuesday afternoon. The company’s CEO, Oleksandr Komarov, said in a video statement that “it is still not completely clear” when the company will restore normal operations.





Does YouTube contain fewer falsehoods or less bias than the Internet as a whole?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2166765/googles-bard-has-one-enormous-advantage-over-other-ai-chatbots.html

Google Bard has one enormous advantage over other AI chatbots

There's a lot of knowledge on YouTube. Bard is learning what it is.

On November 21, Google took “the first steps in Bard’s ability to understand YouTube videos,” according to the list of Bard updates that Google publishes. Coming as it did the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the improvement didn’t generate much notice. But after playing around with it, I have to say that there’s an enormous amount of hidden potential.





Perspective.

https://www.bespacific.com/how-twitter-broke-the-news/

How Twitter Broke the News

The Verge:

Here

is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter. The sense that Twitter was a real-time news feed worked in both directions: people went on Twitter to find out what was going on, and reporters, seeing a real-time audience of people paying attention to news, started talking directly to those people. Twitter knew this and played right into it. In 2009, co-founder Biz Stone wrote that the platform had become a “new kind of information network” and that the prompt in the tweet box would now be, “What’s happening?” “Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about,” he wrote. In short, Twitter was for the news…

reporters around the world provided Twitter with real-time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their biggest advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audiences, and no pesky editorial ethics policies. The news became ever smaller, even as the stories got bigger — there are would-be reporters in every part of the country and world posting for free, even as the local news business itself dries up. Twitter was founded in 2006. Since that year, newspaper employment has fallen 70 percent, and people in more than half of the counties in America have little to no local news at all …”



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