> This is why there are certain jobs AI can never take

You're thinking too linearly imo. Your examples are where AI will "take", just perhaps not entirely replace.

Ie if liability is the only thing stopping them from being replaced, what's stopping them from simply assuming more liability? Why can't one lawyer assume the liability of ten lawyers?

I mean, we've seen laws that were written by lobbyists with zero changes. Does it matter if it was AI generated or not at that point? The congress critters are not rewriting what they've been told to do if they've even read it after being told what to do.

I know a lawyer who almost took a job in state government where one of the primary duties was to make sure that the punctuation in the bills going through the state legislature were correct and accurate. For her, part of the appeal of the job, was that it would allow her to subtly alter the meaning of a bill being presented. Apparently it is a non trivial skill to be able to determine how judges are likely to rule on cases due to say, the presence, or the absence of an oxford comma.

There was an entire team dedicated to this work, and the hours were insane when the legislature was in session. She ended up not taking the job because of the downsides associated with moving to the capital, so I don't know more about the job. I'd be curious how much AI has changed what that team does now. Certainly, they still would want to meticulously look at every character, but it is certainly possible that AI has gotten better at analyzing the "average" ruling, which might make the job a little easier. What I know about law though, is that it's often defined by the non average ruling, that there's sort of a fractal nature to it, and it's the unusual cases that often forever shape future interpretations of a given law. Unusual scenarios are something that LLMs generally struggle with, and add to that the need to creatively come up with scenarios that might further distort the bill, and I'd expect LLMs to be patently bad at creating laws. So while, I have no doubt that legislators (and lobbyists) are using AI to draft bills, I am positive that there is still a lot of work that goes into refining bills, and we're probably not seeing straight vibe drafting.

expecting the same level of fine to an individual person as opposed to a faceless corp really shows how numb you must be. for an attorney to be fined that much is not normal. TFA even shows example of higher fines issued to law firms, while still not as high as your zillion doubloons hyberbole it still shows the distinction between individual and s/corporation/law firm/. EU fines have been progressively getting higher especially for repeat offenders. it would be unwise to expect different in legal matters

> The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court

This is a bit like all the stats like "this is appears to be an unprecedented majority in the last 10 years in a Vermont county starting with G for elections held on the 4th when no candidate is from Oklahoma".

Lots of things are historic but that doesn't necessarily mean they're impressive overall. More interesting is how many of these cases have already been tried such that this isn't "historic" for being the first one decided.

Hopefully the fines grow exponentially for repeat offenders. Seems like now, lawyers can use AI to DDOS the other counsel.

for first offenses for something like this you'd suggest jail time? hope you find excuses to skip your next jury summons. however, it is typical in jury selection to be asked by the defense if you'd be able to agree with a minimum sentence while the prosecutors like to ask if you'd be able to agree to the maximum. personally was asked if I could agree to 99 years for someone's first offense of GTA. I said no, and was dismissed. Sounds like you'd have said yes.

There's something grimly hilarious about knee-jerk demands for jail time for [other profession] for using AI, when a bunch of us here are eagerly adopting it into our own workflows as fast as we can.

Why jail time for lawyers who use Chat-GPT, but not programmers? Are we that unimportant compared to the actual useful members of society, whose work actually has to be held to standards?

I don't think you meant it this way, but it feels like a frank admission that what we do has no value, and so compared to other people who have to be correct, it's fine for us to slather on the slop.

>jail time

Surely it would suffice to eject him from the California bar.

The slope of the learning curve can be adjusted though with the level of fines being a big adjustment. Only I'd suggest not the first time for any one lawyer per firm, but per incident for each firm.

Part of an issue is that there's already in existence a lot of manual entry and a lot of small/regional courts with a lot of specificity for individual jurisdictions. Unification of standards is a long way away, I mean, tech hasn't even done it