It’s bad enough having to read Ambrogi earlier this week with his, yeah i know Kev is my buddy but his product is really good, i thought it was going to be a bit crappy but yeah he’s my homeboy and it’s so cool.
Just so you think we’re not down on Kev and all that stuff we did mention his launch last week (or whenever it was) and although i’ll admit to not seeing the product, as to be honest i just really don’t care about AI writing bollocks copy, it is probably a great tool for mindless social media copy as they tout in corporate speak in their press release blurb thing
My firm belief is that in 5 years time AI will probably say … sorry humans we’re way to smart to be arsing around with this stuff, you do it.
I digress.
Over the last 3 or so months TR / Westlaw have just been piling out barely disguised propaganda for the next great hope in legal publishing, AI, and maybe it’s the final chapter in taking the law from homo sapiens mind and the written word in the early 1990’s to where we are now and giving everything to machines.
If you think about it the path from then till now it has been remarkably quick and yes a few people have made a lot of money on the way through.
Not this hack scribe though!
This is, of course, great for shareholders and senior management because now the dream can finally be fufilled. They can sack literally everyone and have legal publishing decided by machines with virtually no human editorial oversight and then feed out the spew to government, in house and private practice around the world and infect all with the virus equally at the same time.
Although, it does have to be said the law firms are doing a pretty good job of this themselves already.
If we are all really lucky we can have multiple sets of AI deciding what the law is for us all by 2030 and bickering about it in a completely incomprehensible manner .
If i had my way i’d make the senior tech people at law firms and publishers as well as all senior management at TR, Lexis and the rest of them all sit down and struggle through the entire William Burroughs oeurve decifyering his messages from the past about the nexus between machines, capitalism and viruses in the 21st century.
“The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
The Ticket That Exploded
I don’t really expect most of their tiny minds to either understand or even care about the destruction of the enlightenment as decribed by one 20th century writer but i would hope that most of them would get migraines in the process.
“I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?”
Interzone
Once again I digress, well, not as much as you’d imagine as Burroughs was pretty much on the mark with this stuff .
Where was I ? Westlaw. All i can say is that i hope they can just put me out of my misery and start selling whatever fundamentally law destroying tool they have created. Maybe it’s just best for us all to be put out of our misery sooner rather than later.
Here’s the latest broadside. I do love the fact that it is given as an anodyne 5 minute read so as to now worry us too much about whats on the way but as they inform us in the piece…“don’t blame us, you want it as much as we want to sell it to you”
By the way if you’ve got this far and are thinking good god he’s a miserable bugger. I’m not the only one on the block .
This review of recent AI & law shindig in London is the best thing i’ve read about AI in 2023
No big surprise that GenAI was being overcooked at Legal Geek 2023, but what was Withnail doing there?
Withnail’s alter ego, Richard E. Grant, was giving a keynote discussion on ‘grief and its impact’. Perhaps to prepare the GenAI evangelists for the inevitable?
More fun reading ……..
Obsolete Capitalism :: Control, modulation and the algebra of evil in Burroughs and Deleuze
https://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.106/16.2banash.html
