Henry FarrellThe counterargument in the ChatGPT lawyer debacle is that the AI's summarization of the precedent, being based on a statistical summary of the relevant legal debates, is a better Hayekian distillation of the common law tradition than any ordinary exercise in legal pedantry carried out by humans combing Westlaw. The hallucinated citations are a purer form of the caselaw than any merely existing cases in our sordid sublunar realm could possibly aspire to being.
Ben@henryfarrell This is an interesting take, but I think it doesn’t hold, as we empirically don’t yet understand well enough what we get when we enter certain prompts. It’s also not clear that there are prompts that allow us to get the statistical summarization of what the LLM “knows” - without doing some work on the output ourselves…
Also, doesn’t precedence law not mean that a theoretical average doesn’t mean anything, and you need specific, existing cases?
Still interesting!