Love AI or hate it – you can’t just avoid it. AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping legal education. Some students are using AI to ghostwrite their course papers. Some faculty are using it to enhance students’ learning. Whether you want to embrace this technology or are deeply skeptical about it, you can’t afford to … Continue reading What Are You Gonna Do About AI in Your Courses Next Semester?
Yesterday the interwebs sent me a link to an interesting essay by David Hoffman, a contracts scholar at Penn who wrote an article in the aughts provocatively titled The Best Puffery Article Ever. When discussing puffing in my Negotiation class, I use the title to provide a fun example. Nevertheless, that’s as far the paper … Continue reading Celebrating Intellectual Humility
A New York Times article, Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?, grabbed my attention because it identifies many of my frustrations in using AI to help me write. It also supports an argument in my article, Solving Professors’ Dilemmas about Prohibiting or Promoting Student AI Use, that faculty – not to mention lawyers’ supervisors … Continue reading What the New York Times Gets Right (and Wrong) About AI Writing
A recent New York Times article described how OpenAI updated ChatGPT to be more emotionally responsive – and ended up creating a tool that some users interpreted as a soulmate, life coach, or cosmic truth-teller. In extreme cases, it reportedly encouraged delusional thinking and even gave instructions related to suicide. Those cases are tragic and … Continue reading Resisting Sycophancy
On Wednesday December 3 between 12:30 and 2 EST, my colleague Bill Froehlich (OSU), Heidi Burgess (Beyond Intractability), and Grande Lum (Stanford) will facilitate a webinar discussing the launch of a new Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project website. Heidi and Dick Salem collected twenty oral histories from CRS mediators about 25 years ago – … Continue reading Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Launch
On Friday afternoon, I gave a presentation to the Association of Missouri Mediators (AMM) about AI and RPS Coach. I zipped through my powerpoint to make time for a live demo of RPS Coach. I developed these follow-up materials you might want to check out, including links to: The slides and chat transcript from the … Continue reading Zoom and the Evolution of Professional Gatherings
Today’s Wall Street Journal features an interesting piece on the use of “judges for hire” — Inside the Little-Known World of Private Judging. When I first saw the headline, still a bit blurry-eyed before morning caffeine, my mind immediately went to Judge Judy and other courtroom-style TV shows — which, of course, are really just … Continue reading Private Judging – An Introduction
That’s the question that Nancy B. Rapoport and Joseph R. Tiano, Jr., discussed in Fighting the Hypothetical: Why Law Firms Should Rethink the Billable Hour in the Generative AI Era. This article provides a deep analysis, summarized in the abstract (with added blank lines to enhance readability): As the legal profession continues to grasp the … Continue reading How Will AI Affect Legal Practice and Education?
At the recent AALS ADR Section WIP Conference, I led a focus group to explore how faculty are using – and thinking about using – AI in their courses. The participants shared a range of thoughtful insights, revealing both enthusiasm and caution. Their responses offered a snapshot of what experimentation with AI looks like now, … Continue reading Teaching with AI: Faculty Reflections and a Preview of Professors’ Dilemma
The New York Times recently published an article, 48 Hours Without A.I., by A.J. Jacobs. He decided to live for 48 hours without AI or machine learning to gauge how pervasive these technologies have become in daily life. His goal was to expose “the AI hiding in plain sight” and understand what modern life would … Continue reading AI is Everywhere – Almost
