After Moliere: "Good Heavens! For Thirty Years I Have Been Writing Training Data Without Knowing It"

The Moliere quote (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) is generally rendered,

Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

Comments

[Michael P]

Might we call such a person "The Unwitting Professor"?

[BravoCharlieDelta]

At some point the AI is going to be training on AI content because humans won't be making new content.

[Orbital Mechanic]

Isn't it the case that all published works of all kinds throughout all history basically training data for neural nets?

I don't see that it makes much difference that semiconductor-based nets can do it alongside organic nets.

[Sarcastr0]

Molier is very good. And easy reads as well; folks would do well to check him out.

[blue heron]

I find this quote from the scribe more apt: One should look long and carefully at oneself before one considers judging others.

[Mr. Bumble]

Appropriate that you posted that right after SarcastrO.

[Ben_]

Society looks forward to the day when we can all get competent legal advice from free or inexpensive software. It won’t take much longer.

[Dr. Ed 2]

We already can. Its the pro se appearances that suck.

[Noscitur a sociis]

You are, as usual, mistaken.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Really?

[Noscitur a sociis]

What “free or inexpensive software” currently provides competent legal advice?

[wolfefan]

If you're on Twitter you might check out the various threads on legal AI - particularly DoNotPay and Kathryn Tewson's efforts to test it.

[Noscitur a sociis]

I think Kathryn Towson demonstrated pretty convincingly that DoNotPay was simply a scam—that there was no effort (or no serious one) to actually use AI at all.

[Davy C]

We can? From where, the Internet at large? I once tried to look up something rather straightforward (it had a definite answer, not something that depends on interpretations) and got three different answers from lawyer websites in that state.

[Anon]

What an exciting time to be in the field of Corpus linguistics!

[Religion and Politics, my life]

True, but if anything debunks AI it is CL.
I've studied about 7 languages and the usual mistake in learning, which you can't avoid, is to think that a word in a sentence is like a diamond strung together with other diamond-words and all you need to do is look up things in the dictionary. But very soon an idiom shows up like "kick the bucket" and your approach is dead 🙂

[Ruqt]

I will dissent. I enjoy words and in reading stumble on words not in a dictionary, (often archaic, out of use, at times slang) or the dictionary contains a word with the same spelling but different meaning. I find AI unusually apt at locating texts using those words in context. I find AI incomparable in locating sources – lacking title, author, publication date – due to its access to material and ability to match text. AI has other uses as well and it can converse more knowledgeably than any human on a wider variety of topics with amazing skill at responding to prompting to refine, expand, change answers with added information.

[Ruqt]

Lighten up post
"I know seven languages, but I can't speak any of them." - Groucho Marx

[The Turtle Dove]

If machines will digest my jurisprudential reflections,
I shall fill all my hornbooks with SQL-injections.

Mr. D.

[Eric Von Salzen]

If lawyers are to be replaced by AI, a lot depends on whether the AI is trained on (say) Justice Thomas or (say) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

[Religion and Politics, my life]

The Constitution is founded on the unstated. The Natural Law, Reason, Human nature, Epikeia , so that AI will fail immediately.

[Ruqt]

"unstated" what does this mean? subconscious? subliminal? unwritten? unrecorded? Perhaps, you can ask AI to assist you with this?

[Michael P]

AOC is a bartender, not a lawyer.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

So she'll know some of the top lawyers in New York. Just kidding, I think.

[Sarcastr0]

She’s a Congresswoman, and you are an elitist.