Fair Work Commission condemns 'plain wrong' AI legal advice

> Sadnan Khan was ordered to pay $1,230 towards the supermarket giant's legal fees after a landmark Fair Work Commission decision found he used AI as a "quasi-legal advisor" to challenge his dismissal, despite repeat warnings his case had "no substantial prospects of success".

> "I have taken the very rare step of ordering him to pay some of the employer's legal costs, because his unreasonable conduct caused his former employer to incur those costs unnecessarily," Fair Work Commission deputy president Michael Easton said in the tribunal's decision last week.

The article is balanced; it also cites the case of a computer science lecturer at Macquarie University who successfully challenged the university's treatment of him using AI. (Over the past decade or so, Mac Uni has become very attached to the idea that minimum wage is enough for academic staff.)

So it's the same story as we've been hearing for more than a year now: LLMs are only useful if you ignore all the fluff where they tell you how great everything is, and know how to extract and interpret the parts where they say something of substance, and actually do the work of determining whether the thing is bullshitting you.

It's good the tribunal acknowledges we can't all necessarily afford the costs you may incur in those initial discussions with a lawyer. While there are pro-bono lawyers they have to make sure they're taking the cases with the best prospects for success so they don't go out of business themselves.

> "Most community members are aware of this kind of property of AI now where it has a kind of sycophantic tendency … and may in fact encourage people to believe that there are legs in a claim they're making when that may not in fact be the case."

It'll be interesting to see how the AI providers are going to balance the need for models to be engaging enough to keep the tokens flowing but not so engaging they give bad advice to encourage continued conversations.

Thus it might be the first example of AI winning a case that sets some kind of precedent.

At the very least it shows that AI can put together coherent legal arguments even when there are no close precedents or case law it can refer to. This was something a lot of lawyers didn't believe would be possible for AI to do.

I really don't like where this is going.