Friday Morning Navel Gazing

Hello Friends in the Computer,

Just about 11 years ago - God, I am getting so old - I went to Law Via the Internet in Ithaca, NY. This is a conference that initially was a way for Legal Information Institutes to come together and share learnings and evolved to be anyone that delivers legal information and knowledge in digital form. It was mind-blowing and I felt so out of my depth.

It was also the first time I saw reactionary pushback on social media aimed at legal tech. Haters gonna hate hate hate…

ANYWAY.

I came out of that conference with the thought “what does it mean to be an intermediary in the age of disintermediation?” “Intermediaries” being both librarians and legal service providers and “the age of disintermediation” meaning the fact we were seeing more legal information and self-help tools appear in more accessible places (i.e. the internet and companies like LegalZoom.)

Part of that question - the intermediary one - was grounded in self-preservation. What does it mean to be a law librarian when a person can access legal databases and other sources of info on the web? Are libraries and librarians even needed? And part of it was looking for opportunities to expand the mission of libraries and think “what should I be doing to still get in front of people and mediate even though they think they don’t need it?”

I make no predictions on how revolutionary or adopted generative text will be within the large law firm and corporate legal department world. There are so many variables there beyond “what the technology is capable of” - including financial incentives to not be more efficient and human inertia - that I’m taking a wait and see approach. I’m sure there will be dozens of pilots launched in the next six months but let’s check back in a few years from now to see what changes have been made.

I’m much more interested in thinking about how it will affect the world AROUND big and corporate law. The one thing that is amazing and terrifying and fun and intriguing about tools like ChatGPT-[number] is that they are very very accessible, for many meaning of the word “accessible.” At least testing it is.

A big reason why my LinkedIn and RSS feeds are filled with ChatGPT-[number] posts is because any schmo with an internet connection can try it and other AI (generative text or other types) out. This substack I follow - Yaro on Web3 and it’s global impact - often lists new AI tools to try including this 100+ AI tools you can try today post. The resulting test products and analysis that everyone and their brother posts about often leaves something to be desired, but buckle up, chucklefucks because it’s about to get much much worse. For example:

For the time being, let’s ignore Corporprate and Big Law potentially wasting this opportunity and also the total collapse of society. Much like Web 2.0 made publishing content to the internet available to many more people than every before, for good or ill, these new classes of AI tools are going to make projects such as large scale data manipulation and technology development and content generation much easier and available to people.

I guess we’re in the age of Disintermediation 2.0?

And once again, I find myself in the position as a mediator, as a lot of what I do now is use my expertise to create tools and knowledge products. And once again I’m asking myself “what does this mean for me and my future when someone can ask a computer program to do my job and it spits out a pretty good facsimilie?” and also “ how can I get in the way of people and save them from themselves?”

The answer to some of this is that a lot of these tools are only as good as the underlying data and knowledge that they build upon, so there’s that. I don’t ever want to gatekeep -and actually a lot of what motivates my educational work is to demystify tech because there’s so much unecesary gatekeeping - but also the ease with which these tools can be used are going to lead a lot of people to get over their skis and build tools which aren’t actually doing what they thought they were doing.

Related, but defintely about more than AI tools, I also can’t stop thinking about this post I saw a few days ago on Mastodon:

Once again, it feels like we are on top of the first hill of roller coaster and things are going to be moving fast. You can’t really contol it and all you can really do is try to not barf and help clean up your friends if they do.

Be Well,

Sarah