China’s Huawei branded a criminal enterprise as tech firm’s US trial opens

“It’s about competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, ⁠not theft. Ordinary business dealings, not criminal conduct,” Brian Heberlig, one of a team of lawyers representing Huawei, said in his opening.

eep

Three it’s-not-x-it’s-ys in a row. I don’t need to know a watermarking algorithm to know the author isn´t Brian Heberling.

Look, a bot might have written that text, but as part of the legal team responsible for the case he must own what he says. As long as he vets and stands behind all the statements he makes, it shouldn’t matter whether the text comes from himself, another lawyer, an intern, or a bot.

In fact, in the US at least, only humans can be authors. Bots cannot.

The problem comes when people abdicate their responsibility to the bot. Then they let mistakes through that a human would never had done if they came up with the content themselves. For some content, an “oops” is OK. But in court, a blatant “oops” (like citing cases the AI hallucinated without checking them first) should be a career-ending mistake.

“It’s not illegal.” Hoo boy.

That’s not what I said at all. Quite the opposite. Whether a thing is generated by AI or not is irrelevant, especially in court. What matters is that everything presented in court is backed by the legal team that is presenting it. If a lawyer ever uses “The AI did that” as an excuse for an error, they should be immediately disbarred.

If he had an AI write some text and he presents it, that’s not a problem. The problem occurs when he views that as permission to not do his job correctly, because the bot did it for him.

Treat AI like an overly enthusiastic, book-smart intern. There is no ethical dilemma having that intern do research for the lead lawyer, but if the intern makes a fundamental mistake and the lead lawyer introduces it in court, the lawyer would face a reprimand, even though he didn’t make the mistake, for not checking the Intern’s work.

That’s not the point. Using AI generates much weaker rhetoric when lawyers’ job is to persuade. The AI voice is not good (and FWIW your last paragraph sounds that way ).