Stanford University researchers unveiled an AI model they say can analyze decades of property records in just a few days at little expense to weed out racist language, and they will offer the tool for free across the state and around the country.
LLMs are bad for the uses they’ve been recently pushed for, yes. But this is legitimately a very good use of them. This is natural language processing, within a narrow scope with a specific intention. This is exactly what it can be good at. Even if does have a high false negative rate, that’s still thousands and thousands of true positive cases that were addressed quickly and cheaply, and that a human auditor no longer needs to touch.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of this tool.
It doesn’t read the deeds, make a decision, and submit them for termination all on its own. It reads them, identifies racial covenants based on patterns of language (which is exactly what LLMs are very good at), and then flags them for a human to review.
This tool is not replacing jobs, because the whole point is that these reviews were never going to get the budget and manpower to be done manually, and instead would have simply remained on the books.
I get being disdainful or even angry about LLMs in our unregulated-capitalism anti-worker hellhole because of the way that most companies are using them, but tools aren’t themselves good or bad, they’re just tools. And using a tool to identify racial covenants in legal documents that otherwise would go un-remediated, seems like a pretty good use to me.
Given the error rate of LLMs, it seems more like they wasted $258 and a week that could have been spent on a human review.
LLMs are bad for the uses they’ve been recently pushed for, yes. But this is legitimately a very good use of them. This is natural language processing, within a narrow scope with a specific intention. This is exactly what it can be good at. Even if does have a high false negative rate, that’s still thousands and thousands of true positive cases that were addressed quickly and cheaply, and that a human auditor no longer needs to touch.
What do you believe would make this particular use prone to errors?
The use of LLMs instead of someone that can actually understand context.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of this tool.
It doesn’t read the deeds, make a decision, and submit them for termination all on its own. It reads them, identifies racial covenants based on patterns of language (which is exactly what LLMs are very good at), and then flags them for a human to review.
This tool is not replacing jobs, because the whole point is that these reviews were never going to get the budget and manpower to be done manually, and instead would have simply remained on the books.
I get being disdainful or even angry about LLMs in our unregulated-capitalism anti-worker hellhole because of the way that most companies are using them, but tools aren’t themselves good or bad, they’re just tools. And using a tool to identify racial covenants in legal documents that otherwise would go un-remediated, seems like a pretty good use to me.