Danny Wilf-Townsend

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

And thank you to @wertwhile.bsky.social for the shoutout and discussion of my work!

And I completely agree with what @wertwhile.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social say about OpenAI's o3 being the model to focus on—lots of people are forming impressions about AI capabilities based on older or less powerful tools, and aren't seeing the current level of capabilities as a result.

Testing generative AI on legal questions—May 2025 update The latest round of my informal testing

Finally, the work of mine that is discussed a bit is this informal testing of AI models on legal questions. The most recent post is here: www.wilftownsend.net/p/testing-ge...

On the issue of AI increasing numbers of lawsuits and a "Jevons paradox" for litigation, I would recommend @arbel.bsky.social's work here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
and Henry Thompson has some interesting thoughts about these dynamics as well: henryathompson.com/s/Thompson-A...

First, on using AI to predict damages / outcomes, check out work by David Freeman Engstrom and @gelbach.bsky.social, which discusses some areas this is happening (ctrl+f for "Walmart" to find relevant sections):
scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_rev...
scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol23/is...

A very pleasant surprise to listen to one of my favorite podcasts and hear my own work being discussed. And it's an excellent episode and overview for anyone thinking of AI's effects on the legal profession. Some thoughts / suggestions below for anyone who wants further reading:

What an interesting question — cool study.

Judge Alsup has the first true opinion on fair use for generative AI in Bartz v. Anthropic. He holds that AI training is fair use, and so is buying books to scan them, but that downloading pirated copies of books for an internal training-data database is not fair use. 🧵

I think this is one of the more common mistakes I see with people trying AI—the idea that if you go to a free chatbot, quickly run a question by it, and it does a bad job, then you've learned that AI cannot do a good job on that question.

US judge rules health insurers, MultiPlan must face price-fixing lawsuits A U.S. judge on Tuesday said healthcare providers can pursue claims that technology provider MultiPlan and a group of insurers conspired to underpay them billions of dollars in reimbursements for out-of-network health services.

Significant ruling in one of the big algorithmic price-fixing lawsuits going on right now: www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

A good thread on a big new generative AI / IP lawsuit—Disney and Universal vs. Midjourney

Thank you, Erin! That’s very nice of you to say.

Glad you liked it!

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.

Some ideas for judges, lawyers, and legal academics on trying generative AI On the usefulness of personal experience, and suggestions about what to try

I've had a few recent conversations with judges and law profs who haven't tried generative AI, or have only used it for a few minutes to write a poem or other trivial fun. After a few people asked me about how to start, I thought I'd write up my suggestions: www.wilftownsend.net/p/some-ideas...

My guess is that those concerns will tend to result in more emphasis on formal and informal recommendation networks—people who have seen the candidate engage with ideas "IRL". Maybe more challenging "on the spot"-type interview questions would help, but that might require too big a change in norms.

After years of studying AI & law here’s my rule of thumb: Lawyers should only use AI only when they can confidently assess, adapt & explain its output without engaging in deep, independent thinking about the core legal/factual issues. More in my new essay: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The problems are with the affordances of the technology and how they mislead even sophisticated professionals: these tools work extremely quickly and dispense superficially coherent and confident output. These qualities override skepticism and promote reliance.

This is one of my favorite books to recommend to students (I actually have two copies). One of my teaching aspirations is to someday have a seminar read this alongside @nbagley.bsky.social’s Procedure Fetish and Kagan’s Adversarial Legalism.

When it comes to this set of issues I think it’s important to disaggregate. Parts of the NEPA critique, for instance, strike me as still reasonably strong, even while the political environment shows how important it is to be able to challenge the state in general.

Yes, that’s a good point, and also a reaction I had when reading the article — it’s framed as about “adversarial legalism” but leaves big swaths out of its analysis. I just pulled that quote out to represent the argument in the text, but it’s definitely unclear without that context

Abundance liberalism versus adversarial legalism To displace legal vetocracy, abundance liberals must find other ways to generate authority that people can accept.

"Litigation...is not simply a tool...it embodies an organization of political authority that is politically attractive to Americans–and self-reinforcing. Turning away from litigation may require re-legitimating and re-empowering other forms of authority." hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/abundance-...

Here's the link: lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/...

Very cool to see that @kevintobia.bsky.social's and my article got @lsolum.bsky.social's "Download it while it's hot!" recommendation on the Legal Theory Blog!

Here is a thread with the full article that the blog post is based on: bsky.app/profile/dann...

When computers generate legal text, that matters for everyone—not just lawyers Some thoughts on "generated legal texts"

In this blog post I discuss a new article in which Kevin Tobia and I examine how widespread AI texts are in legal institutions, initial policy responses some have made, and the concerns all of this raises alongside opportunities: www.wilftownsend.net/p/when-compu...

People often treat AI-generated legal texts as an issue of legal ethics (e.g., hallucinated citations) or industry economics (will AI replace associates?). But as legal institutions start receiving, processing, and using generative AI, it's going to affect all of us 🧵

The use of generated legal texts raises familiar issues in the world of AI (e.g. bias, inaccuracy) but also some distinct concerns (insincerity, a flood of documents). Check out our paper here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Abstract Generative AI’s sudden growth has transformed the production of data, images, videos, and especially text. And with that impact on text comes impact on law. From contracts to judicial opinions, from legislation to litigation, nearly every aspect of the law operates through text. Yet while there is much legal scholarship on AI, little work focuses on legal texts as the relevant unit of analysis. We introduce the concept of “generated legal texts,” arguing that how these texts are deployed across different legal institutions creates common patterns and concerns—making them worthy of study in their own right. Through a broad empirical survey, we document the breadth and speed of generated legal texts’ integration into our institutions, revealing how they are already reshaping the legal landscape. Next, we classify the types of these new generated legal texts, the forms of human co-production of these documents, the texts’ audiences, and the spectrum of regulations concerning generated legal texts. Generated legal texts raise concerns such as bias and inaccuracy that are common with AI. But they also raise distinctive new issues, like “floodgates” problems and concerns about sincerity. We identify and elaborate on those concerns, and then discuss the emerging putative solution of “ratification,” in which an individual or body assumes responsibility for the text by “ratifying” it. By drawing on embedded legal norms, ratification has many strengths as a tool for shaping the responsible use of generated legal texts. But it also has limitations, reflecting the need to pay close attention to generated legal texts going forward.

I've got a new paper up with the inimitable @kevintobia.bsky.social: "Generated Legal Texts"—about texts generated by AI and used in legal institutions. These texts are arising frequently in legal contexts around the world, perhaps faster than many realize. And, we argue ...