AI Hallucinations And Judicial Derangements

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Welcome back to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by Kathryn Ruino and Chris Williams also.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey friends.

Chris Williams:

Hello, hello.

Joe Patrice:

We are back. We had a week off because we were involved in one of the busier weeks in legal for those of you who are headquartered in New York as we are, which was legal week. So we’ll talk a little bit about that in a bit, but that’s why we weren’t around last week. But we’re back now and that’s exciting. And we will begin as usual with a little of the old small talk. How’s everybody feeling today?

Kathryn Rubino:

I’m okay. I don’t know, man.

Joe Patrice:

Are you wiped out from the week that was?

Kathryn Rubino:

I am, but that’s not because of the vigor of legal week, but my family has an annual St. Patrick’s Day party every year on the Saturday before the holiday. So that was this weekend and it was- Oh, nice. Yeah. I mean, it’s really good and fun. And my mother enjoys the fact that the people that were kids that went to the party 20 years ago are now bringing their kids to the party. So she enjoys that kind of generational thing, which is great, but there was just a lot in a house that is not actually prepared for a nearly three-year-old, which is what I brought with me. That was my party trick.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Nice.

Chris Williams:

Well, I found out apparently over the weekend, Habermas died. Yes.

Joe Patrice:

I did see that.

Kathryn Rubino:

I heard I was like 96 or something. I was like, I was unaware he was alive, to be fair.

Chris Williams:

I feel that, knock on wood saying this, I feel that way about Morgan Freeman. I’m assuming he’s still alive. I’m also assuming he was born in 82, so he just doesn’t age in my mind. But yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah,

Chris Williams:

I know. So I spent a little bit of this morning listening to a, not a Habermas lecture because he didn’t speak much because of the speech impediment, but a lecture about Habermas and this notion that the nature of language itself suggests justice, the notion that we need to be able to communicate with each other and speak truthfully, which is a nice fantasy. But it’s warming to read and hear things like that, considering the things we hear told by our government.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I did see a lot of stuff kind of lamenting the late career shift that he took where it did get a little bit more fanciful as the years went by and a little further away from kind of a old school-

Kathryn Rubino:

Practical.

Joe Patrice:

… Frankfurty kind of critical stuff. So yeah, interesting. He’s a philosopher that I think lawyers have always kind of liked. He said that talking is powerful. Lawyers love to pat themselves on the back about that. Think

Kathryn Rubino:

That it matters. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Hobarmas

Chris Williams:

Talk.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Kathryn Rubino:

I

Joe Patrice:

Love that

Kathryn Rubino:

For us.

Joe Patrice:

All right. Well, we’ve talked about this for a bit. Let’s move on. I may find my button.

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s what she said.

Chris Williams:

Kathryn. There are one else listening.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay.

Joe Patrice:

Okay. With that, we should transition to talk about our first story of the week. The biggest story of the week last week was something you were working on, Chris, about … Well, I mean, look, a lot of things we talk about these days have to do with AI. This one is a situation of AI costing someone their job, but not in the way all the AI providers would like you to think.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. So there’s assistant US attorney out coming out of North Carolina. Name is Rudy Renfir. I hope I’m saying that right, but if not, I’m sure AI can correct me. Got in trouble because he filed a response with the court that was, as the French say, wrong, had a whole bunch of AI generated quotes, faulty case holdings. And the way he got caught was there was this pro se litigant who read it through, who, to be fair, was also a lawyer. But he read through and was like, “Hey, this isn’t real,” as the kids say. So he got in trouble, tried to fix it, but double down on more AI usage. And then the judge was like, “Tell me why I shouldn’t, one, sanction you, but also everybody you’re working with, ” which is a sentiment I think that judges need to have a lot more often when it comes to dealing with people who are being lazy with their work.

Joe Patrice:

I don’t

Chris Williams:

Care if it’s because of AI or whatever, just hold people accountable. He must not have been able to come up with a good reason why he shouldn’t be sanctioned along with his department because he decided to step down rather than face the consequences.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I mean, it is nice to see judges starting to take the AI situation more seriously. I believe the total is now, I think we’re now over a thousand of AI screw-ups in legal cases. So it was all well and good early on, but here we are. Yeah. The way

Chris Williams:

I see it, AI mishaps were cute back when it was, “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I am not a cat. This is a facial filter. I don’t know how Zoom works.” But in the big year of 2026, it’s been years now. We need to treat this as if people should know better because they should.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, I remember when the first big story happened, the Avianca one, there were a few people who were like, “They should have the book thrown at them for making this mistake.” And I thought this technology is so new. They didn’t understand that it had these risks, whatever. And I thought that was a … I think they got $5,000 sanction or something like that. And that seemed to make sense at the time. There is no more excuse at this juncture. And the fact that courts continue with these largely slap on the wrist sanctions is only emboldening people to just take a lazy approach to their editing and here we are.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. But I mean, I don’t want to come across as being easy on folks who are using AI to write their briefs, but I’m not sure. Well, I mean, I’m not sure somebody losing their job over it is necessarily in a balanced response either. I mean, I guess it was his choice

Joe Patrice:

In

Kathryn Rubino:

This instance, and query whether or not all the things that we’ve already talked about, about all the problems working for the government currently might have also helped him make that decision. But I don’t know. I don’t think that you also deserve to lose your job necessarily. It was able to be corrected. There is a shortage of government attorneys. I’m not sure that this is necessarily the correct sanction either, especially on the first time. Well,

Chris Williams:

That’s the thing, it’s not the first time. He did wrong, and then he doubled down on doing wrong in the exact same way. And even there was still the grace of the judge at least being like, “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t punish you, ” rather than directly punishing them. There was a lot of grace in this story as far as I just read it.

Joe Patrice:

I will say that the, give me a reason why that’s usually judge speak for- I’m going to do it.

The order to show cause is usually a, you are real already screwed. But no, it is true. I agree. I think that if this had been a mistake and they owned up to it, it would be very different. And I think that all the other conversations we’ve had about the DOJ do speak to this, right? Because the concerns that we have with the DOJ at this juncture are that they are not the highest of quality work anymore, that they are lying to tribunals by direction in a lot of cases. But I mean, this speaks to that too. The concern right now that multiple judges have voiced is it is wild that when a assistant US attorney speaks, we no longer take that as the full benefit of the doubt. And while we were talking about that mostly for political reasons, this adds to that. It adds to the further tarnishing of that.

And I also think I’m one of those folks who thinks the prosecutors probably should be held to a higher standard as far as this since they control whether or not people go to jail and stuff. So yeah, so I’m a little bit more on the side of people need to get sanctioned harder. And in this instance, yeah, took the exit door, which I guess nice to not throw all the office under the bus, but it does raise the issue, like what is going on in that office. Usually the workflow is not somebody writes a brief by themselves and no one ever looks at it. What’s happening there?

Chris Williams:

Well, the thing that I think is interesting that I didn’t get into the story because it was speculative and it’s not the thing that Joe thinks I’m going to say. I wonder how much of it was actually his decision to step down because as I read the story, the assumption being made was that he was the agent there, that he decided to step down. But it’s like when there was the threat of collective punishment, it also makes sense for a higher up to be like, “You need to fall on your sword because we’re not dealing with this bullshit.”

Joe Patrice:

That’s also true. Again,

Chris Williams:

I didn’t have that in an article because it’s speculative, but I’m like, “Really? He was the one that, of all the times to pull my culpa, it’s when there’s also other people above you that will get in trouble. Nah, you got told to do that. ” But the thing Joe thought I was going to say, there was prior coverage of a story where it was Pam Bondi was trying to put herself in another one of those I am the state positions where she was going to be the only one that would have been the one to determine if people in the, I want to say the DOJ could get sanctioned or what have you.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So in that instance, the DOJ dropped with no real warning, a proposed rule that would change the way in which assistant US attorneys are governed. Basically, they would no longer be subject to … She wants to make it so that they are no longer subject to ethical rules in the state that they’re in, which has long been and by statute is how it operates. And she wants to say that she and the DOJ itself gets to intervene and protect licenses there. Now that wouldn’t affect court sani judge sanctions and contempt and stuff like that, but if there had been follow on discipline, which theoretically there could be for something like this, that would be referred to state disciplinary authorities to punish somebody for making mistakes. And under this proposed rule, if it were to come to pass, that would be voided and it would be up to Pam Bondi whether or not somebody did anything wrong that could impact their license.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. I imagine that you’d have to say if you did get in trouble under Pan Bonnie with that authority you have to say three hail Trumps and

Joe Patrice:

Like

Chris Williams:

A certain amount of truth social posts to be forgiven.

Joe Patrice:

Well, no, absolutely. It’s a very interesting story. It is another instance of everybody needs to … AI is not going away particularly quickly, and so maybe it’s time for you all to start editing your briefs a little bit closer. With that said, let’s take a break here and then we’ll transition to another story. All right. So, oh, wow. I actually just realized, I said at the end that we’ll transition to another story. I did not actually look at my queue to realize that that was the story that we were going to go into.

Chris Williams:

Oh.

Joe Patrice:

No. No. So this story is about the Ninth Circuit and it was a case about trans discrimination actually. And the decision was a challenge to an enforcement action in Washington State. The people involved did not challenge the state law that actually protects against trans discrimination. They merely challenged the enforcement action, and that is a critical distinction for those of you who are lawyers, which I know a lot of you are, but for those who aren’t, that is an important distinction. If you say that the law itself is good and you’re only challenging the enforcement, that changes the calculus. And in this instance, the Ninth Circuit ruled that since they were only challenging the enforcement action, yes, trans folks are protected under this law. So no, the enforcement of this law against the folks involved was totally sound. That said, there was a dissent. There were a couple of dissents.

There was dissent that was kind of more like what you would expect of a federal judge. And then there was Judge Lawrence Van Dyke, those of you who have followed this long enough, he was one of those judges who was ruled, not qualified for the job, but the Republicans put him in this position anyway. And he began his opinion by talking about how this is a case about swinging dicks and went on from there. Oh

Kathryn Rubino:

Boy, just

Joe Patrice:

To be clear.

Chris Williams:

Just be clear, he didn’t start talking about it. It was literally the opening sentence, right?

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Yes. Let’s be clear. When I say he began with this, I mean, that is the opening sentence.

Chris Williams:

Like thesis statement.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. It descends from there into a series of diatribes against woke judges and all sorts of stuff. As far as a legal argument goes, he does not have much of one, but to the extent he has one, it is all a bunch of arguments about how this law shouldn’t exist, which of course is not actually what the case is about since that is not an argument anyone has ever raised. He also goes into some, well, maybe there should be a private club exemption. And maybe there should be certainly also not something that anybody has raised in this case, but it doesn’t really matter because I think the consensus is that his whole point was he was just trying to audition for the Trump’s favor and-

Kathryn Rubino:

And that is literally stories we’ve written about Lawrence Van Dyke before, right? That he writes or has video dissents as well

That we’ve also written about that are not written to convince lawyers of anything exactly what you said, Joe, that there isn’t much law in this dissent in particular. And it’s really just a way to get headlines. This is the sort of story that kind of breached the wall and is not just a legal story. This is the sort of story that mainstream publications are picking up as well because the federal judge said, “This is a case about swinging dicks in the opening.” So this is the exact sort of thing that catches the attention of the far right powers that be right now.

Joe Patrice:

It brings me back to the … A few years ago, there was some Yale law controversy about FedSoc people making all sorts of bigoted remarks and being like, “Hey, I have free speech.” And that mentality, this kind of trolling for the sake of trolling is what’s rewarded within the, that is the coin of the realm and the right-wing legal movement at this point. Lawrence Van Dyke exemplifies that more than any other of the Trump judges probably. He knows that this is the sort of crude, vulgar conversation that will get him attention. He knows that these sorts of implicitly bigoted remarks are what appeals in this. I think I have a line that in the article, something about how the conservative legal movement, when it changed its guiding intellectual light from William F. Buckley to kid Rock, some things subtly changed, and that’s where we are.

And so I think of this as kind of like a law school story in that this is coming more and more, because this is how these kids are, and we saw that in the law school story. He’s kind of the vanguard of movement of this, but this is what you should expect going forward unless something deeply changes with the way this movement operates.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think we also need to call attention that his rhetoric has become increasingly more volatile the longer he’s been on the court. He started by saying things like his colleagues were criminals on the Ninth Circuit.

Joe Patrice:

Sure.

Kathryn Rubino:

He said that they were possessed. He did a gun case. He did a video dissent. Then he started calling the Ninth Circuit the Circuit of Wacodo, and that was almost too folksy for him. And now he kind of has sort of talking about trans people in super offensive ways. And maybe this is the thing that’ll finally catch the attention.

Joe Patrice:

So this rehearing, this was about a rehearing on bunk. So it was only in front of the panel about whether or not they do this, whatever. And so three judges, yada, yada. But half the full court, including a bunch of the senior judges, do get involved in this case because in addition to the opinions in the case, there are multiple statements being lodged with it. And those statements are other judges who are on the full Ninth Circuit who have no position in this case as such, signed on to statements being like, “This is not okay.” And the biggest one involved, I think 28, I think, senior and active judges and the chief judge writing about how this rhetoric and everything surrounding it is wildly inappropriate. It undermines the faith and the courts and the rule of law. Two judges, kind of a center left and center right representative signed just a separate statement by themselves.

It was a sentence long that was just like, “We need to be better than this, or we’re better than this basically.” This is actually something I wanted to spin out with you all because I got some pushback on social media about this and I thought it was interesting. I said, “Well, what about … ” They brought in most of the senior and active judges, the full 51 judges on the Ninth Circuit, but 22 of them said nothing. And I was like, “That’s kind of a silence’s complicity point.” And I got some pushback because they aren’t supposed to be involved in this case. These senior judges are very old and they aren’t really technically on this matter. So why would you expect that? You shouldn’t, whatever. I thought about that. And even if I were willing to carve out the, I think there are 10, or no, 12 seniors who didn’t have any involvement in it, even if you carve those out, there’s still a lot of people who should have said something one way or the other.

But it got me thinking, especially in contrast with, we’ve talked a lot about Judge Newman in the federal circuit who’s trying to do her job at an older age, but she is still trying to be active. With her trying to be active, I thought if such a juxtaposition to be like, “Oh yeah, but these 80-year-old judges who are technically on senior status, they don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on at their court.” And I’m like, “If you keep yourself on the letterhead, we expect the bare minimum of you. You have to step up in these sorts of situations. The email was circulated.”

Kathryn Rubino:

And yes, that’s obviously true, but I think that the fact that Van Dyke is ramping up his rhetoric is also a reason to get everyone involved. They absolutely made a choice. Doing nothing is a choice and maybe they would like to think themselves above the fray, but you have to look at what’s happening to the judiciary currently in 2026 and say, “Oh, standing by the sidelines is not going to get the job done.”

Joe Patrice:

I mean, yeah, there is a Nixon appointee here, but you don’t have to be on senior status. If you can’t do the job, you can retire then. Anyway, yeah. I

Chris Williams:

Have questions that would lead me to conclusions. The first was obviously not the instance, but in cases where there is a … I’m trying to think if there even is a norm here considering how ridiculous the behavior of the judge was. But in other cases where there’s a panel of judges that aren’t involved in the case, it seems like it would be abnormal for them to just join in and give their opinions. So given that them joining and give their opinions, it would be cool if they did it, but it doesn’t seem like it’s normbreaking for them to not do so.

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Chris Williams:

So I wouldn’t flack them for it.

Joe Patrice:

That’s a great point. And that is the one distinction. So this statement is not an opinion. So they don’t take any stance on the decision itself in the separate statements. They only say, “Hey, Van Dyke needs to get in line and not talk like this. “

Chris Williams:

But related to that, and this is the one where it still gets a little iffy, is the, given how politicized everything is, just the statement, “Hey, he needs to get his act in order,” could be read as taking sides in a way that might not be in the best interests of judges who are interested in maintaining neutrality. So while there’s also the interesting value of judges needing to police their own, because who else is going to do it, does that means of policing suggest that they are not neutral in cases to come? And that’s a

Joe Patrice:

Weirder

Chris Williams:

Position for me, and I’m not sure where to lie on it, but I think it’s important for the conversation.

Joe Patrice:

And I think that is a great point. And I also think the fact that there were two statements I think is critical here because I think the one that McCown writes that most of them sign on to does talk a little bit about the case. I mean, it’s not about the case, but talks about the specific things that he said. And you could interpret that if I’m signing onto this, maybe I’m endorsing some of the underlying merits, even though it expressly says no. But that’s why I go to the Owens and Forrest opinion, because they put out the statement separate. They intentionally did not sign onto that one and wrote the one that was just the sentence, “We are better than this. ” They kept it as 12 words long to take no stance on anything just other than we can’t allow our court to look like a circus.

And I thought that statement was almost sitting there as a competing statement for, “Hey, if you’re worried at all this is going to look like you’re supporting the merits one way or the other, you could sign onto this one and it’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to judge you for this one.” I don’t know.

Chris Williams:

I would imagine that if it was a different instance and say that we need to act better is coming from the right, I think the take, I think even the ATL take would be this is unnecessary moralising. Judges are showing their hands by doing this.

Joe Patrice:

Maybe it depends. I mean, obviously context matters a lot. If the

Chris Williams:

Purpose is to police internally, have the conversation without putting it on paper. The fact that it is on paper

Kathryn Rubino:

Is- But it already is on paper, right? That’s the thing. The dissent already exists. People are reading it. And I think that it is, even if it’s moralizing, and I don’t think it is when you’re just saying, “Hey-” We need to do better. “You’re being a jerk.”

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Right? I think that that is well within the bounds of collegiality.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, obviously there’s line drawing. If this were just somebody were unduly snippy, like an old school scallia argument where they’re just mean to the other judges, I could see moralizing there and responding to it with like a, “Oh, come on, toughen up.” But here, we’re taking pot shots at a group that’s discriminated against, so it’s already elevated a little. Yeah, no, it’s a series of interesting questions. I do think though that at the point that so many judges are getting involved, it means that the opinions are getting circulated to everybody, even if they aren’t technically on the panel. At that point, I think you kind of have to, whether you want to or not, you have to come out with an opinion one way or the other because at that point they called the bluff and it is just going to force us all to look at the other 20 whatever judges who did nothing and go, “Well, what was your excuse?” And four of those people who said nothing one way or the other were active judges.

And I don’t understand at all how they got to avoid this. But anyway, well, we should take a break and be back in a minute. Okay. So closing out, let’s just have some quick talks about last week, why we weren’t here. So it was Legal Week, which I was the only person who went to the actual show itself, but we all went to some of the surrounding events of the show. We all were at Above the Law hosted a happy hour. Some of you were there hopefully, and hopefully you had a good time. Others weren’t, but keep an eye out for when we host events, because it’s nice to see everybody. And that was a good time had by all, I thought.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes.

Chris Williams:

I didn’t know that many people were interested in legal tech. When we walked into the bar, I was like, one, the pizza is far better than I expected. And also, has this place ever been this crowded?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Yeah. It was a smaller venue than we expected. It’s interesting. You never can’t tell who’s all going to show up at those things because there’s so many competing happy hours and all.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Well, I also think it’s interesting because Legal Tech moved its location this year. It was at the Javid Center, which was a little bit further off to the side than the previous location. So there was a whole new set of bars and locations that people were gravitating around. And I think that was probably part of it too, trying to find our footing in new areas.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. For the show itself, there were, I believe, something on the order of like 6,500 attendees or something like that. That’s

Chris Williams:

Exactly how

Joe Patrice:

Many

Chris Williams:

People were in the bar.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it felt like it. But no, so it was a big show. Obviously, a lot of the conversation about AI to contrast with our opening story, these were more serious people about the tools that can bring AI to lawyers in something of vaguely resembling a responsible manner.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, and Joe, you went to the show, you talked to lots of people about AI. And I know that you’re a bit of an AI skeptic, particularly as it comes to a lot of the agent stuff and a lot of the big promises. Is there a little bit of a pulling back of the sort of pie in the sky the more sort of these cases lawyers are misusing AI in really problematic ways? Is there sort of a sense that maybe we need to pull back on these promises because the market ain’t ready for it?

Joe Patrice:

It’s weird. I don’t think really, because I don’t think a lot of the hype is controlled at this level. I will say there are a few providers who are very hype based, but there are others. I think a lot of the narrative did focus on the kind of the distinguishing of folks who can bring data to bear in some good way. Your document management systems, for instance, where they’re talking about and really hyping up, yeah, AI’s great. It does all these wonderful things for us, but the reason you want to get us in there is like the quality of the data, the quality of the structure we could put on. A lot of people are kind of entranced by the idea of these like million token context windows, but one, a million tokens is not very much when you think about the scale of a discovery project or your own firm’s document management.

And two, my sense of the million token window is that after a couple hundred thousand, the models go, “Eh, we’ve seen enough.” And so it’s not really all that accurate. And like a lot of very clever folks were talking about the ways in which you have to use structure to the underlying data to allow these models to be used in a way that actually gets you any kind of real results. So there’s a lot of folks who were pushing back against the AI hype, not so much pushing back, but saying like, “It doesn’t do a lot of stuff, but here’s what we can do to make it work.” And I haven’t written about it yet because it’s sad because I’ve been meaning to write about this from the moment it dropped and then it dropped during Legal Week and I didn’t get to it yet.

But Briefcatch has a catch the hallucinations that people put in their briefs tool that they put out, which is super useful, but it speaks to the way in which there’s a shift from pie in the sky stuff to starting to deal with the real on the ground problems that people are hallucinating all the time. You need to know quick whether they’ve done it or not. Well,

Kathryn Rubino:

Especially because some judges are saying that you’re responsible for not catching your opponent’s

Joe Patrice:

Hallucinations.

Kathryn Rubino:

So there’s a real … You really do have to be able to catch this stuff.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. And in that instance, there’s also the value to, look, when a case is faked, that’s one thing. But what about the … There’s kind of a gray area where points are being made that are not really accurate or being made by AI. And does that impact and color the argument in a way that you need to know and say like, “Oh, this wasn’t produced by a human. Maybe I should View with a little bit more scrutiny what’s going on here. It’s interesting stuff. Yeah, no, it was a crazy week, very busy week. I had like 40 meetings. I talked a lot about cybersecurity with some people because I find that it is not getting the attention that AI gets, but strikes me as a much more clear and present danger right now and one that AI actually exacerbates. So yeah, I feel people need to start caring about that more.

Unfortunately, it still seems to not have that. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Not a sexy, right?

Joe Patrice:

It’s not. No.

Kathryn Rubino:

Which I think that that should play better actually with the legal market. I think that lawyers tend to be sort of little C, conservative, want to make sure that everything’s buttoned up before they launch onto a new technology or a new product. And I would think that making sure that you’re not vulnerable should actually be a top priority in this space.

Joe Patrice:

I’ll tell you, beyond just pure cybersecurity, I saw Portal 26 was showing me their product that just gives you instant visibility of all the AI usage in your company. And it did just like, oh no, I mean, this user just tagged, just pinged this one, this one just pinged this one. And it can shut down if it’s going toward dangerous ones. It can search the prompts to make sure that if there’s a prompt that has personally identifiable information that shouldn’t get out there, that it gets cut off. Yeah. If

Kathryn Rubino:

You thought it

Joe Patrice:

Was a problem for

Kathryn Rubino:

Your employees to click on phishing emails,

Joe Patrice:

Do

Kathryn Rubino:

We have a worst case scenario for you?

Joe Patrice:

No, I mean, and those are the sorts of products that I think are less sexy as you put it, but are definitely going to be more important over the long haul.

Kathryn Rubino:

For sure. Well,

Chris Williams:

All the times that I’ve thought about AI surveillance, I’ve always thought that the object were people, not other AI programs. So it’s wild to hear that that’s even a thing, but it makes sense.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, I guess it sort of is people because they’re the ones writing those prompts. But yeah, it’s like trying to make sure that the AI doesn’t go out and do something crazy because yeah, you can dump confidential information into some of these models and then it’s technically out there. And that’s the Rakoff thing, decision that we’ve talked about in the past. There are courts who now say that maybe once you do that, it’s no longer a secret if you ask an AI for it. But very interesting week. Love it. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Quick clarification. Does that apply to any AI program or just ones that can be accessed by people outside of the firm?

Joe Patrice:

Great point. He was taking it as the terms of service of them, which are ones that go out mean that. And even though those companies will say we protect your data if they have in their terms of service, but you are sharing it with us, that was enough to put it out there from his perspective. But obviously there was a counter opinion in Michigan. So yeah, we’re still early on, but very interesting stuff. All right. Well, so I think with that, we’re done. Thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show, get new episodes when they come out. You should listen to other shows. Kathryn’s the host of The Jabow. I’m guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should listen to other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should be reading above the Law all the time. You should be following us on social media abovelaw.com.

I met Joe Patrice. Kathryn’s at Kathryn one, the number one. Chris is at writes for Rent as in typing, not human rights, but typing rights for Rent. And with all that said, we’ll talk to you later.

Chris Williams:

Peace. Peace.

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