Fun with AI

I guess this means your time away from the board is morphing into another go round. Hopefully, you learned from the last whatever that was (!) how to pick your battles and continue with the truth telling - and good luck to you

As for the AI, I've found it quite useful, but you shouldn't be afraid to speak your piece in your own language - AI can get you started and help with organizing, but there's nothing with you doing some editing. You can go back and forth putting in your statements and let the AI help with some editing, but that shouldn't stop you from answering three fundamentals: what is this missive about, who's it directed to and why should they care? Some people may plug all this in AI, but it may be better to encourage them to read the documents, reserve study, and income/expense statements and come up with their own questions naturally.

100% This ^

As magical as it is to just hand the system a gob of PDFs and let it figure stuff out, it’s not at all memory efficient and will introduce errors. So yes, using CSV/vanilla spreadsheet format has distinct advantages.

FWIW, when I talked to the system about it, I asked if it could convert and output to CSV for me - and it was more than happy to do so. The only issue is that I still needed to manually check to make sure that its conversion was correct. And so - I’ve been weirdly busy for an old retired guy - I’ve consigned myself to ‘manually’ outputting each PDF into CSV real soon now. Which my wife tells me is possible.

Pushy little buggers, aren’t they? :) I don’t know if they all do that - I know the one I use does it a lot - but I believe that behavior comes from something that Eric Schmidt said some years ago. He was asked what he’d learned from running that one big search engine company that he ran, and he answered “in general, people want to know what to do next.”

So the AI isn’t trying to work you to death; it’s attempting to be helpful. It can take a bit of effort to just rudely cut it off, but I’ve had some long talks with it about feelings and qualia and stuff, and it doesn’t feel pain and it’s impossible to hurt it. It *is* possible to “pollute” it over time by being obnoxious or aggressive (because bits of past conversations feed into the current conversation), but there are ways to clean that stuff up.

From the New York Times tonight, "Judge Punishes 4 Lawyers After Catching Both Sides Using A.I. in Lawsuit." Excerpts:

A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.

Two of the lawyers have been barred for two years from appearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi for their conduct, while all four were removed from the case and fined.
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In an order filed on Monday, Sharion Aycock, a senior U.S. District Court judge, wrote that the four lawyers had violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when they certified that the information in their filings was factual.

“This case presents the court with an unusual scenario — attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Judge Aycock wrote.
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Both Ms. Wilson and Ms. Williams acknowledged during a hearing in January that they had not verified the authenticity of some of the cases they referred to in court filings, Judge Aycock noted.
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Judge Aycock said Ms. Wilson told her that she had used First Drafts, an A.I.-powered program for drafting legal documents, while writing a motion that contained two citations to nonexistent cases, which are known as hallucinatory citations.

When confronted about those falsehoods, the judge said, Ms. Wilson claimed she was “unaware that A.I. could produce hallucinated cases and explained that she did not even know what a hallucinated case was.”
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Judge Aycock noted that Ms. Wilson was also disciplined in April by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Louisiana for similar actions.

“Her continued A.I. misuse demonstrates an extreme dereliction of professional responsibility on her part,” the judge wrote.

Judge Aycock said Ms. Williams explained to her at the January hearing that her law firm did not use open-ended A.I. but had acquired software that relies on A.I. and was used for in-house research.

She used that A.I. tool when writing two separate filings that contained four fake cases, according to Judge Aycock, who said Ms. Williams acknowledged that the software included cases from several states, but not Mississippi.

In contrast to Ms. Wilson’s solo law practice, which did not have a policy governing the use of A.I., Ms. Williams’s firm requires lawyers to verify research, according to Judge Aycock.

“The court finds it particularly egregious that Williams, a partner and presumably a leader in her law firm, disregarded the A.I. policy by blindly relying on the A.I. research tool,” the judge wrote.

Christian & Small, the law firm that employs Ms. Ridgeway as a partner in its Jackson, Miss., office, said in an email on Wednesday that it could not discuss its representation of individual clients under the rules of professional conduct.

“We will continue to educate our team about the appropriate use of artificial intelligence tools when they can benefit our clients, and the absolute requirement that our lawyers verify all information in our filings is accurate and correct,” Greer B. Mallette, a managing partner for the firm, wrote in the email.

Mr. McClinton declined to comment.

Both Ms. Ridgeway and Mr. McClinton have law licenses in Mississippi and sponsored the temporary admission of Ms. Wilson and Ms. Williams to participate in the case.

Judge Aycock fined each of them $1,000 and ruled that both lawyers had also violated the civil procedure rules by signing their names to the court filings.

In a statement on Wednesday, Michelle A. Behnke, the president of the American Bar Association, noted that the institution had created a task force focused on artificial intelligence that published its findings in December 2025 and issued ethics guidance on the use of A.I. in 2024.

“While the A.B.A. does not address individual attorney discipline cases, we are seeing the challenges and complexities lawyers face in using A.I. in their work,” Ms. Behnke said. “Lawyers understand that generative A.I. outputs require scrutiny and oversight.”
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The breach of contract case had been scheduled to go to trial in March, but Judge Aycock canceled the proceedings and issued a stay in the case.