I am very interested in the uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Having been gifted with very little of the natural stuff, I appreciate any help I can get.
On February 29, 2024, attorney Heather Atnip, addressed the Detroit Bar Association on: Small Firms: The Use of Technology to Level the Playing Field.
Heather gave a fantastic presentation. The most interesting part, utterly amazing to me, was her use of CoPilot, Microsoft’s AI Companion. As part of the Microsoft plan she has, she has asked CoPilot to analyze her briefs, find the 5 best arguments the opposing party could have to counter her position, and provide the best responses to those arguments. Impressive, indeed. In fact, I have related Heather’s story to a group of attorneys I recently addressed and I received audible gasps from the audience. Well, if not actual gasps, certainly murmurs of amazement.
Thereafter I decided to play around with CoPilot. I had never asked AI to generate an image for me, so the first thing I did was ask CoPilot to generate an image of Larry Fine of the Three Stooges,one of my legal heroes (please see his performance in Disorder in the Court-1936). The result didn’t look too good, so I refined the request to include Moe and Curly Howard. The results were the two images that appear at the top of this post. The fellows look like members of a 1930s English Music Hall Act, and not a very good one even by the standards of that era. The images were laughably bad.
If this is as good as we can get from AI, I don’t think it will be replacing attorneys quite yet. Judges? Maybe. I mean look at those pictures and try not to be reminded of your last visit to the Michigan Court of Appeals.
In a future post, I’ll relate my attempts to use ChatGPT. I recently asked it to list the 5 greatest attorneys in metro Detroit history. The credibility of the result was destroyed as I was not included on the list. However, that was not the only, or arguably the biggest problem. More about that another time.
