My son is in a lawsuit with his bank where they put through fraudulent charges and wouldn't charge them back then the bank sued him for the money. He is using Claude and Gemini fighting the original lawsuit and now has a counter-suit 100% using AI for everything. He puts it into different AI's to check everything against each other and to come up with more ideas. He started with ChatGPT, moved to Grok, then Claude, but now Gemini is turning out to be the strongest.
I'm about as pro-AI as anyone here. I say this with love: anyone using general-purpose, consumer-grade AI for healthcare, law, or taxes is mad. Best wishes to your son, bless his heart, but please have him consult a qualified lawyer before showing up to court with model-drafted legal documents. Among other things, those chats are not privileged information[0] and the banks could subpoena chat transcripts to see what else he might have told them.
He has had multiple hearings and the Judge has reviewed everything. The court clerk reads every submission and before the clerk puts it in the system they have a in-house lawyer review each document. This is pretty far along. The trial is scheduled for October of this year.
The bank has a lawyer, they were hoping for a default judgement because who can afford to fight the bank. The choice is fight it yourself or declare bankruptcy.
As you already know, AI companies trained on every single document they can find. Those include legal documents. The legal system is structured where you have Federal Laws, State Laws, Federal & State Regulations and Court Precedent. Because of this structure it is not difficult for a LLM to figure out.
I'm curious if you can have a judge XYZ skill where you have an ai analyze how that judge ruled for certain judgements in the past, and how similar lawsuits/arguments did in front of them. Might help to angle the ai's findings a tad, or might also not be worth the effort. Both are possible
Good luck to him. I get worried about people using AI for serious work in a field they aren't specialized in, but if it helps him achieve a good outcome, that would be interesting.
I have often felt that the legal system is divided between haves and have-nots: if you can afford to participate, you get "justice" tilted toward you. Easier participation for those without the resources for a lawyer would be good.
The second article I linked, from the MIT Technology Review, is quite interesting. It seems like judges are experiencing some version of what open source maintainers and seniors at companies are experiencing: a much larger review burden due to the cost of generating code or legal arguments dropping drastically.
I wonder what form this structural shift in output versus specialist review capacity will take in other professions. The frontier labs seem to be trying to automate more and more of the "specialist review" process. I am not sure that is feasible in the legal world, but we'll see....
Ok, but curb cuts also positively impact wheelchair users, people with canes or walkers, people with injuries that require crutches or a knee scooter, parents with strollers, people with rolling bags, cyclists, delivery workers and more. They are widely understood to benefit many many people beyond just people with disabilities (so much so that their benefit has given a name to the "curb cut effect").
Also, $60k/year is a) not nearly enough to pay a contractor full time living wage and b) not enough to cover the greater than full time necessary to assist someone. Blind people need to navigate the world at all hours on all days...
As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.
People seem to forget how many companies Bill Gates put out of business by using their designs. It takes years to sue and win damages minus lawyer fees. Then to try to whitewash his reputation by giving the money away.
I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich. They remember that the damage he caused mostly affected capitalists and professionals in developed countries. His businesses mostly didn't abuse labor in developing countries. He didn't cause that much environmental damage. He didn't undermine democracy and the society that much.
People remember that Bill Gates played the game and won, and the damage he caused was mostly limited to the economic sphere and to other people playing the same game. That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
>I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich.
That rags-to-riches myth about Bill Gates is not true.
He was a Harvard dropout, but not some poor kid.
Bill Gates was always rich. But with Micro$oft's success, he became a lot lot richer later.
His mom sat on some major committee at IBM. She had significant clout there.
That's how Bill even got the chance to pitch a new OS when the IBM big bosses were looking to unleash their new PCs.
Do you really think they just yanked a school dropout from the streets into their boardroom to decide important business future for their company?
Paul Allen had started Microsoft with Bill Gates. It was Bill's mom who pitched Microsoft as a potential partner to IBM's CEO John Opel.
Bill Gates scouted and found a chap (Tim Paterson) having a working prototype called 86-DOS. And Bill purchased it (with his family money), rebranded it as PC-DOS and sold it to IBM (but he cunningly kept the copyright as he rightly figured that other manufacturers would clone the IBM PC hardware and would need a DOS for their PCs (thus, he later licensed the new OS to non-IBM PCs as MS-DOS)). I daresay his mom was instrumental in such cunning dealmaking.
>That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
The problem is that he is using his wealth for some shady stuff, so it is not good.
Bill Gates's name is mentioned in the Epstein files, for some unsavory links to that child molestor.
And his BGMF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) got banned in India from funding local NGOs, because a Parliamentary committee indicted BGMF's involvement and funding for shady and shoddy vaccine trials on tens of thousands of poor Indian tribal children without informed consent and under false aegis.
Be careful whom you consider your heroes. They may not be all they seem to be.
in these countries simcards and cell phones are not so strictly linked to personal identity documents, so even if the chats are decrypted it is not very helpful
What about location? Wasn’t there a thing about whatsapp encryption leaking gps location or something?
Really sad to see humans being able to be this nasty to each other. Technology being the enabler and enforcer, and also the means around detection.
These scams are really a good excuse to force whatsapp to do something about their technology. Afterall they patented it (probably) so their own it and they should do their best to ensure it’s not abused.
myanmar has had an ongoing civil war for decades so location is moot. there is no central authority that has the ability to deal with these things. the scam centres can get a lot of freedom just by supplying tinned food and petrol to whichever group they are closest to.
there are 100+ formal languages in Myanmar, at least 100 unique ethnic groups, and over 150 armed combat groups. and the ethnic diversity is very abrupt, people living 30km away from each other can be so different they can't communicate with each other at all. foreign governments have almost zero influence on the ground
Aeon[1] just published a piece on the topic. It discusses the victim versus villain aspect.
Having read that, it seems that the only remedy would be a Chinese government intervention (as it seems to be Chinese criminal gangs that run these facilities). That intervention might be triggered by the international image lose for the government in being associated with these scams.
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