In recent posts, I have been skeptical about using AI to generate certain kinds of legal writing. I’ve drawn a distinction between using AI to edit or revise a document and using it to create one from scratch.
I take the view that even if you can avoid hallucinations, using AI to create a court brief is likely to raise issues of competence. And I’m not convinced it is well suited to drafting opinion or demand letters, because it leads to writing that comes across as flat and robotic, verbose, and overly formalistic.
But there’s another view out there that says I’m only seeing AI used poorly or ineffectively. On this account, AI can produce authentic writing so long as the user prompts it extensively and with enough specificity as to be responsible for the ideas, arguments, stylistic choices, and so forth.
A few lawyers have shared examples of this approach with me — opinion and demand letters, emails — asking effectively: isn’t this good enough? Look how much time I saved!
In March, New York lawyer Zack Shapiro made this case in a lengthy essay that went viral on X. As he notes in the essay itself, he wrote it with AI.
So am I just being a Luddite? Maybe. But I remain skeptical.
The ethical questions are important, but I want to set them aside and focus on quality and efficiency. My view is that if you use AI to write by prompting extensively, you won’t get a better document. You’ll get a different one. And people who care about writing will notice.
It matters most, I think, in scholarship, journalism, and court briefs. But what about opinion letters, client emails, or other lower-stakes writing where the case for efficiency is stronger?
Here too, I’m not entirely persuaded. I’ll take up two arguments for co-authoring with AI and explain why, in most cases, I think claims about quality and efficiency are overstated.
Shapiro’s beef with Klein
The best argument I’ve come across for co-authoring with AI appears in Shapiro’s essay. He frames it against Ezra Klein’s concern that writing with AI bypasses the hard part of writing — the struggle of figuring out what you think.
Shapiro’s reply is that Klein is wrong to assume that thinking disappears when you co-write with AI. The real cognitive work, he says, can happen before the prompt. You do the planning, analysis, strategy, and judgment yourself, and then use AI to execute on that thinking or show you what you missed. That, he says, is what he does in his own writing.
The choice is not simply between writing that is “human-made” and “AI-made,” but a third category in the middle: writing produced by a human who has done the thinking and used AI as a collaborator. For Shapiro, the real divide is between the slop produced by “someone feeding a one-sentence prompt into a chatbot” and “work where a human showed up with something worth saying, and used AI to say it better, faster, or at a scale they couldn’t reach alone.”
The point is not to rein in your use of AI for certain things, as I have argued, but to learn, when doing those things, ……
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