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Hey you, don't read that
Read this!
This is the heavy, heavy monster sound
The nuttiest sound around
So if you've come in off the street
And you're beginning to feel the heat
Well, listen buster
You better start to move your feet to the rockiness
Rock-steady blog of madness
One Post Behind!
Not to be confused with One Step Beyond, the source of those reworked lyrics. I have some more of those I may get to in this one. Or the next one. Or one after that. Life.... it's what happens when you're not writing posts.
Last time, I said I needed to be sure to post the latest insanity from the Mrs. Malaprop who resides in my phone. Her nonsense shows up when I dictate things. As annoying as it is, it does give me some comfort when I read about fears of the bots all turning on us because we’ve taught them to be too smart. If a virtual assistant can’t even figure out simple grammatical structure, or thinks when I say the word "Metz," it means a client I had 20 years ago because she's still on my contact list and not the team I’ve mentioned 1 million times since then, I don’t think they’re taking anything over. At least not on purpose. If Siri got the nuclear codes, she might launch an attack on Alabama, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing
So also last time, I was talking about an old song by Warren Zevon. Particularly, these two lines:
♫Roland searched the continent for the man who done him in,
He found him in Mombasa in a bar room drinking gin….♫
I did NOT go on to complete the verse with the next couplet:
♫Roland aimed his Thompson gun, he didn't say a word,
But he blew Van Owen's body, from there to Johannesburg....♫
That was out of temporary sensitivity. A friend in Virginia had just told me about the latest mass school shooting in the school district she works for in Richmond. (The latest one that week, anyway:) Emily was supposed to drive up here from their home in Lynchburg VA the next morning, because she’s been exhibiting in the preeminent Buffalo area art show over this weekend, so I texted her and Eleanor to warn about the possible triggering news. I usually make fun of how Siri butchers my text messages when I dictate them, but this was not a time for her to be funny with the word “particularly."
Only the word "Korean" in there scares me. I mean, Kim Jung Un's got nukes....
----
The other deep fake, dive, whatever, in the land of AI came later, on Thursday. My only appointment was to prep with a client for Day Five of the arbitration from hell next week, and I took time to confirm at OTB that my mystery horserace tickees from last week did, in fact, not win anything. But Charlie the Butcher is across the street, so I wound up spending 70 bucks on beefs on weck and frieds bologna sammiches for everybody in the office. Around then is when I remembered that Thursday was the designated date for an NYC law firm and its red-pixel-handed lawyers to show cause to a federal judge why they shouldn't be disciplined for making shit up with a chatbot.
Unfortunately, the suspense continues: the judge reserved decision. Ah, but there is other fun stuff on the free-linked docket. Many meas of culpas and throwing of colleagues under MTA buses. Such as this submission (it will download a pdf which you may have to open outside your browser) from the law firm itself which did, if they still do, employ these jokers:
In the Order, the Court describes this situation as “unprecedented.” We agree. We can find no case where, as here, a lawyer using a new, highly-touted research tool obtained cases that the research tool itself completely made up. The lawyer, Mr. Schwartz, had no idea this was happening, even when opposing counsel brought their inability to locate the cases to his attention. ChatGPT even assured him the cases were real and could be found on Westlaw and LexisNexis, and continued to provide extended excerpts and favorable quotations. Now that Mr. Schwartz and the Firm know ChatGPT was simply making up cases, they are truly mortified; they had no intention of defrauding the Court, and the mere accusation – repeated in hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and online posts – has irreparably damaged their reputations. They have apologized to the Court in earlier submissions and do so again here.
In other words: we believed a bucket of bolts on our desktop when it told us it wasn't lying. DONNNT SANCTION USSSS!
Somehow, I don't think that's going to go well for them.
----
Some of the anger about these new technologies may come out of concerns over competition- because as I learned at our annual Buffalo-Rochester joint bankruptcy seminar in Batavia, some lawyers, and some of their clients, don't need AI to be complete and utter assholes on their own.
This was our first in-person gathering in four years. Many of the lawyers there, I hadn't seen in over three. Our chief bankruptcy judge, only the second time (I had one live court appearance with him last fall and will see him again in just over 24 hours in that courtroom). The format remained the same: a morning of "concurrent panels" which you picked between a business or consumer focus, then a Judge and Other MuckyMucks Roundtable Q&A, and finally two for-everyone presentations on new legislation and on ethics. The latter, of course, is where most of the dirty laundry comes out. Witness this old chestnut from our neighbors in Syracuse (footnote omitted):
The basis for the motion, which was not opposed, includes Chadick‟s delay in filing the instant case for ten months after receiving payment of his attorney fees in full, his failure to contemporaneously date the petition and schedules when executed, failure to notify the Debtor of his unilateral adjournment of the Debtor‟s first meeting of creditors conducted pursuant to 11 U.S.C. section 341 (“First Meeting”), at which Debtor appeared pro se without benefit of counsel, and Chadick‟s unilateral rescheduling of the First Meeting to a date on which Debtor could not be present due to a pre-scheduled hospitalization of Debtor‟s son. At the hearing on August 13, 2009, Chadick agreed to disgorge and pay over to the Debtor the $750.00 in attorney‟s fees that he received for his representation in this case and further agreed not to file any new bankruptcy cases on behalf of debtors in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York, Syracuse division. The court was awaiting submission of a consensual order signed by the parties, reflective of the disposition of the motion announced on the record made on August 13, when the court received a letter from another client of Chadick‟s regarding his representation related to her filing for bankruptcy relief. The letter immediately prompted entry of this court‟s Order to Show Cause.
He seems nice. He's also been completely disbarred in New York now. And possibly dismembered, for in the larger lecture hall where I spent most of the day, there was this attendee hanging around in the closet:
I couldn't resist the obligatory skullie:
(Note to chatbot: cite that as In re Yorick, 564 B.R. 1616 (Bankr. WDNY 2023). I just made that up, but SO DO YOU!!!)
We also got to hear about clients who are just as scuzzy. Particularly, about the Lying Sacklers of Shit, who just as the materials went to print, got an appellate court ruling in NYC from a three-judge panel which reinstated their Purdue Pharma bid to escape personal liability for the opioid crisis by buying their way out of it. It was actually a 2½-to-½ decision, with one judge on the panel (former Western New York jurist Richard Wesley) allowing the buyout but harshly criticizing how it was justified.
On a less snarky note, we gave moments of memorial to two among us who passed since last year's Zoomery. One, I'd heard about, though way too long after he passed, and I honored my connections to him here last December when I did learn. The other news was news: Jane Wolfe was a US attorney who specialized in tax cases brought in bankruptcy. I'd had dealings with her for decades, mostly resulting in kindness and compromise. She left a wife and many good memories of her. Her obituary from April ends with, In lieu of flowers and donations, Jane would rather everyone love each other and just do good.
Maybe the Sacklers can grind THAT up and snort it:P
----
Finally for now, since I began with a brief song parody, I shall end with a longer one. I wrote it during the waning moments of Friday's seminar as words came pouring out about the federal Trump indictment. LARGE AND ALL-CAPPED among those words, though, was this Tweetish thing from the defendant himself:
Welp. I may not be way up on criminal law and procedure, though I am brushing up for this haul (ask me about bench trials and judgment N.O.V. sometime, now that the criminal case has been assigned to a Trump toady judge in Florida), but I do know me my Billy Joel songs. And if you're going to use a line from the title track of Billy's last great album-
- you're going to need to sing at least the entire first verse of the song:
♫Some people put mementos into a box
When their time of working someplace is done
They take them down to the trunk of their car
And bring them back to their home down the road
Not many of them take a truck full of shit
And stuff it down in a shed by their pool
That has his club members walking right by
And each getting a nuclear code
I know you're probably partly insane
You say you declassified with your brain
That’s not the statute
But you’re not above U.S. criminal law
No matter how many fools you incite
You’re not above doing anything
That a grand jury finds to indict
Some people think they can do nothing wrong
Because his toadies all tell him he can
So I am laughing my fool head off
When you say “I am an innocent man!”♫
Read this!
This is the heavy, heavy monster sound
The nuttiest sound around
So if you've come in off the street
And you're beginning to feel the heat
Well, listen buster
You better start to move your feet to the rockiness
Rock-steady blog of madness
One Post Behind!
Not to be confused with One Step Beyond, the source of those reworked lyrics. I have some more of those I may get to in this one. Or the next one. Or one after that. Life.... it's what happens when you're not writing posts.
Last time, I said I needed to be sure to post the latest insanity from the Mrs. Malaprop who resides in my phone. Her nonsense shows up when I dictate things. As annoying as it is, it does give me some comfort when I read about fears of the bots all turning on us because we’ve taught them to be too smart. If a virtual assistant can’t even figure out simple grammatical structure, or thinks when I say the word "Metz," it means a client I had 20 years ago because she's still on my contact list and not the team I’ve mentioned 1 million times since then, I don’t think they’re taking anything over. At least not on purpose. If Siri got the nuclear codes, she might launch an attack on Alabama, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing
So also last time, I was talking about an old song by Warren Zevon. Particularly, these two lines:
♫Roland searched the continent for the man who done him in,
He found him in Mombasa in a bar room drinking gin….♫
I did NOT go on to complete the verse with the next couplet:
♫Roland aimed his Thompson gun, he didn't say a word,
But he blew Van Owen's body, from there to Johannesburg....♫
That was out of temporary sensitivity. A friend in Virginia had just told me about the latest mass school shooting in the school district she works for in Richmond. (The latest one that week, anyway:) Emily was supposed to drive up here from their home in Lynchburg VA the next morning, because she’s been exhibiting in the preeminent Buffalo area art show over this weekend, so I texted her and Eleanor to warn about the possible triggering news. I usually make fun of how Siri butchers my text messages when I dictate them, but this was not a time for her to be funny with the word “particularly."
Only the word "Korean" in there scares me. I mean, Kim Jung Un's got nukes....
----
The other deep fake, dive, whatever, in the land of AI came later, on Thursday. My only appointment was to prep with a client for Day Five of the arbitration from hell next week, and I took time to confirm at OTB that my mystery horserace tickees from last week did, in fact, not win anything. But Charlie the Butcher is across the street, so I wound up spending 70 bucks on beefs on weck and frieds bologna sammiches for everybody in the office. Around then is when I remembered that Thursday was the designated date for an NYC law firm and its red-pixel-handed lawyers to show cause to a federal judge why they shouldn't be disciplined for making shit up with a chatbot.
Unfortunately, the suspense continues: the judge reserved decision. Ah, but there is other fun stuff on the free-linked docket. Many meas of culpas and throwing of colleagues under MTA buses. Such as this submission (it will download a pdf which you may have to open outside your browser) from the law firm itself which did, if they still do, employ these jokers:
In the Order, the Court describes this situation as “unprecedented.” We agree. We can find no case where, as here, a lawyer using a new, highly-touted research tool obtained cases that the research tool itself completely made up. The lawyer, Mr. Schwartz, had no idea this was happening, even when opposing counsel brought their inability to locate the cases to his attention. ChatGPT even assured him the cases were real and could be found on Westlaw and LexisNexis, and continued to provide extended excerpts and favorable quotations. Now that Mr. Schwartz and the Firm know ChatGPT was simply making up cases, they are truly mortified; they had no intention of defrauding the Court, and the mere accusation – repeated in hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and online posts – has irreparably damaged their reputations. They have apologized to the Court in earlier submissions and do so again here.
In other words: we believed a bucket of bolts on our desktop when it told us it wasn't lying. DONNNT SANCTION USSSS!
Somehow, I don't think that's going to go well for them.
----
Some of the anger about these new technologies may come out of concerns over competition- because as I learned at our annual Buffalo-Rochester joint bankruptcy seminar in Batavia, some lawyers, and some of their clients, don't need AI to be complete and utter assholes on their own.
This was our first in-person gathering in four years. Many of the lawyers there, I hadn't seen in over three. Our chief bankruptcy judge, only the second time (I had one live court appearance with him last fall and will see him again in just over 24 hours in that courtroom). The format remained the same: a morning of "concurrent panels" which you picked between a business or consumer focus, then a Judge and Other MuckyMucks Roundtable Q&A, and finally two for-everyone presentations on new legislation and on ethics. The latter, of course, is where most of the dirty laundry comes out. Witness this old chestnut from our neighbors in Syracuse (footnote omitted):
The basis for the motion, which was not opposed, includes Chadick‟s delay in filing the instant case for ten months after receiving payment of his attorney fees in full, his failure to contemporaneously date the petition and schedules when executed, failure to notify the Debtor of his unilateral adjournment of the Debtor‟s first meeting of creditors conducted pursuant to 11 U.S.C. section 341 (“First Meeting”), at which Debtor appeared pro se without benefit of counsel, and Chadick‟s unilateral rescheduling of the First Meeting to a date on which Debtor could not be present due to a pre-scheduled hospitalization of Debtor‟s son. At the hearing on August 13, 2009, Chadick agreed to disgorge and pay over to the Debtor the $750.00 in attorney‟s fees that he received for his representation in this case and further agreed not to file any new bankruptcy cases on behalf of debtors in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York, Syracuse division. The court was awaiting submission of a consensual order signed by the parties, reflective of the disposition of the motion announced on the record made on August 13, when the court received a letter from another client of Chadick‟s regarding his representation related to her filing for bankruptcy relief. The letter immediately prompted entry of this court‟s Order to Show Cause.
He seems nice. He's also been completely disbarred in New York now. And possibly dismembered, for in the larger lecture hall where I spent most of the day, there was this attendee hanging around in the closet:
I couldn't resist the obligatory skullie:
(Note to chatbot: cite that as In re Yorick, 564 B.R. 1616 (Bankr. WDNY 2023). I just made that up, but SO DO YOU!!!)
We also got to hear about clients who are just as scuzzy. Particularly, about the Lying Sacklers of Shit, who just as the materials went to print, got an appellate court ruling in NYC from a three-judge panel which reinstated their Purdue Pharma bid to escape personal liability for the opioid crisis by buying their way out of it. It was actually a 2½-to-½ decision, with one judge on the panel (former Western New York jurist Richard Wesley) allowing the buyout but harshly criticizing how it was justified.
On a less snarky note, we gave moments of memorial to two among us who passed since last year's Zoomery. One, I'd heard about, though way too long after he passed, and I honored my connections to him here last December when I did learn. The other news was news: Jane Wolfe was a US attorney who specialized in tax cases brought in bankruptcy. I'd had dealings with her for decades, mostly resulting in kindness and compromise. She left a wife and many good memories of her. Her obituary from April ends with, In lieu of flowers and donations, Jane would rather everyone love each other and just do good.
Maybe the Sacklers can grind THAT up and snort it:P
----
Finally for now, since I began with a brief song parody, I shall end with a longer one. I wrote it during the waning moments of Friday's seminar as words came pouring out about the federal Trump indictment. LARGE AND ALL-CAPPED among those words, though, was this Tweetish thing from the defendant himself:
Welp. I may not be way up on criminal law and procedure, though I am brushing up for this haul (ask me about bench trials and judgment N.O.V. sometime, now that the criminal case has been assigned to a Trump toady judge in Florida), but I do know me my Billy Joel songs. And if you're going to use a line from the title track of Billy's last great album-
- you're going to need to sing at least the entire first verse of the song:
♫Some people put mementos into a box
When their time of working someplace is done
They take them down to the trunk of their car
And bring them back to their home down the road
Not many of them take a truck full of shit
And stuff it down in a shed by their pool
That has his club members walking right by
And each getting a nuclear code
I know you're probably partly insane
You say you declassified with your brain
That’s not the statute
But you’re not above U.S. criminal law
No matter how many fools you incite
You’re not above doing anything
That a grand jury finds to indict
Some people think they can do nothing wrong
Because his toadies all tell him he can
So I am laughing my fool head off
When you say “I am an innocent man!”♫