Could the predictive text generators we refer to as AIs help Pras Michel’s famed celebrity lawyer, David Kenner, draft a solid closing argument? Nope! Michel was convicted and the Kenner has questions of his own to answer.
Michel’s new counsel from ArentFox Schiff said that the AI-generated closing argument by Michel’s previous lawyer, David Kenner, was a resounding flop: “Kenner’s closing argument made frivolous arguments, misapprehended the required elements, conflated the schemes and ignored critical weaknesses in the government’s case,” the brief said. By using an experimental AI program to generate his closing argument, the brief said, Kenner botched “the single most important portion” of Michel’s jury trial.
Boing Boing readers may be familiar with the “engineer” form of know-it-all (engineer’s disease/syndrome) where specialized expertise makes fools of them when they assume it applies to other domains. But I’m an aficionado of the lawyer equivalent, which is more common in American public life and often misapprehended as engineer’s syndrome. While engineer’s syndrome can be summed up as a performance defined by knowledge, the lawyer version is knowledge defined by performance.
Yeah yeah whatever, turns out that something more mundane is going on here:
What’s even more egregious, according to the ArentFox brief, is that Kenner and Israely “appear to have had” an undisclosed financial interest in a company called CaseFile Connect, which acted as a “technology partner” to EyeLevel.AI. The brief asserts that Kenner and Israely regarded Michel’s trial as an opportunity to tout CaseFile Connect, advancing their own financial interests at Michel’s expense.
Never hire a lawyer who has had so much cosmetic surgery you could store their corpse at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and no-one would be able to figure out where the hell the smell is coming from.
