Comment by jrflo
15 hours ago
Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
15 hours ago
Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
> it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
Don't be too sure about that. [0]
0: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
> all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans
I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver
But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence
Sure but just like generating 100x more code, someone has to review it. So you are wasting everyone in court's time (defendants, prosecutors, judges, staff) by making them parse through what is quite often a bunch of hallucinated slop. Time that could be much better spent on parties who prepared and reviews their own arguments.
The lawyers I know are very fixated on the problem of hallucinated case citations which is amusing to me as a onetime programmer, since case citations have a well-defined syntax and would be relatively easy to check programmatically.
Which makes it all the more bizarre that LLMs have this problem. Claude Code runs the code it generates through a compiler, why can’t an LLM run its product through a cite checker? I’ve seen LLMs fabricate citations.
A modern frontier model with an agentic harness will check its citations if the system instructions or prompt tell it to.
You can get an effectively-zero hallucination rate with the right setup already.