alt Hacker NewsHow is this not effectively a ban on representing yourself in court? The lawyers and judge are going to be using AI. But the layman isn't allowed to use it?
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Its no different then if you ask a friend (who is not your lawyer) for advice. You can ask anything you want, it just only gets the special protection if it is actually your lawyer.
So, how would it apply to web searches? If a lawyer searches something for a person's case, is it protected? If a person searches something for their own case, does it have a similar level of protection? Seems AI chats would need to follow the same rules.
I think this means that if lawyers use it, they have also lost confidentiality. That could be a significant issue in a big case.
[Edit: Or maybe not, legally. But they have definitely lost confidentiality in the "corporate secrets" sense, and that may still matter.]
This is exactly what it is. I know someone that's essentially representing themselves in family court. They had attorneys but the attorneys are basically useless for you if the opposition has more money and can spam you with motions that they are using AI to generate. which you then need to pay a lawyer to respond to. They since began representing themselves due to lack of money, and lawyer incompetence, and actually started to shut down the opposition... then the judge threatened contempt of court and jail time during one hearing if they chose to continue to make a statement and not accept a court appointed attorney to speak for them. Family court in the US is an absolute farce. The same judge recently started asking about "chatGPT" and mentioning that anything there would need to be disclosed to the courts. The person I know was primarily using their own local machine and models, however.