AI Hallucinations And Judicial Derangements

It was Legalweek last week, and we discuss the big happenings from the show — which is pretty much all AI talk — but while we saw splashy product announcements about the future of working as a lawyer within an AI-enhanced workflow, an assistant U.S. Attorney got bounced from the job for letting AI run too much of the workflow. But the most imaginative large language models wouldn’t have predicted opening a federal judicial opinion with the phrase “swinging dicks.” That takes a special level of deranged that’s pure Judge Lawrence VanDyke. The certified non-qualified occupant of a Ninth Circuit seat kicked off an official taxpayer funded rant about wokeness framed as vulgar trolling to appeal to the White House. His colleagues — most of them anyway — issued a plea for decorum, that went basically nowhere.