Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.
I… don’t even. I lack the words.
I’m genuinely amazed at the calibre of people running the US. More so that aparently half the nation thinks its the best choice.
Yeah, the mental acumen on display is truly terrifying. Just not in the way Cohen would love to understand that sentence as. 😅
Michael Cohen was working for Trump precisely because he couldn’t get a proper lawyer job elsewhere. Good lawyers will steer clear of a client that will ask them to commit crimes for them.
I think this is fairly reductive. I work in a related industry. Often it’s the best lawyers working for the shadier clients, for obvious reasons.
That being said, the best lawyers avoid clients who have a bad habit of not paying.
I’m not.
We’ve seen little other than the loss of economic and social liberty in the last 40 years.
99% of voters still choose the same two parties in charge of it like clockwork.
Instead of amazement, I feel cynical resignation.
The impending doom of the fascist right is the only thing keeping me voting for the dems. If we had rank choice I’d be so much happier voting every election.
That’s the thing. I look around and have no reason to think fascism is impending. It’s here.
Women are getting jailed for miscarriage, cops are hanging out lackadaisically outside a school shooting on their phones with zero consequences, homeless jumped 12% in one year, and the big issue is sending hundreds of billions more off to other countries’ wars.
The only plus is that things have gotten so bad it’s forced unions to become more aggressive and unyielding, which has effected more positive change for workers than the ruling parties have achieved in decades.
I don’t know if you’re into podcasts, but Adam conover’s podcast Factually is really great. They have an episode called " what’s the left gets wrong about the right" and it dives into how the right is primarily a reactionary movement to social and economic progress to try to maintain power for the owning and ruling class. It’s a really great episode and it hits a lot on some of the similar points that you were mentioning with the unions. It’s definitely worth checking it out If you’ve got like an hour to kill, It’s super dope.
Conover’s rant about the Patagonia founder’s billion dollar donation to avoid taxes and set his kids up is really good too.
Women are getting jailed for miscarriage
Are you talking about the Ohio woman, because she wasn’t arrested for a miscarriage?
Sure, you can argue she got arrested for “abuse of a corpse”, but
In September, when Watts went to the hospital in pain and passing large blood clots, doctors told her that despite some fetal cardiac activity, her roughly 22-week pregnancy was not viable. She was in and out of the hospital over the next three days, including a lengthy wait for a hospital ethics panel to determine whether her preterm pregnancy, which was on the borderline of Ohio’s abortion limit, could be induced without legal liability for the doctors. Watts eventually went home against medical advice and experienced the miscarriage on the toilet
You’re leaving out the part where she tried to shove it down the toilet, then left it there for an extended period of time when that didn’t work.
Yes, people afraid of going to jail for their bodily function will behave in unpredictable manners.
That’s the second time a lawyer has made this mistake, though the previous case wasn’t at such a high level
Not even close to the second time. It’s happening constantly but is getting missed.
Too many people think LLMs are accurate.
I work for a law firm, and yeah, this happens a lot. The stupidity and laziness of our clients’ in-house attorneys is making us a lot of money.
So, AI is… checks notes… making you a lot of money, by association?
I do get profit sharing. :)
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The problem is breathless AI news stories have made people misunderstand LLMs. The capabilities tend to get a lot of attention, but not so much for the limitations.
And one important limitation of LLM’s: they’re really bad at being exactly right, while being really good at looking right. So if you ask it to do an arithmetic problem you can’t do in your head, it’ll give you an answer that looks right. But if you check it with a calculator, you find the only thing right about the answer is how it sounds.
So if you use it to find cases, it’s gonna be really good at finding cases that look exactly like what you need. The only problem is, they’re not exactly what you need, because they’re not real cases.
