Your goal is to keep AI-driven change from outrunning your capacity to govern, validate, and adapt to it. If you are thinking only about slowing AI down, you are focusing on the wrong problem.
During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, public health officials introduced a concept that quickly entered the common
Beyond Hallucination: Semantic Laundering, Semantic Stewardship, and Prompting Aikido in Human-AI Collaboration
Abstract:
The primary conversation surrounding generative artificial intelligence centers on factual fabrication: hallucination. While hallucination matters, it represents a crude and easily detected failure mode. This paper identifies a second, quieter epistemic risk: semantic laundering. Large language models produce exceptionally fluent, coherent, and
The August issue of my Personal Strategy Compass newsletter is now available: “The Night Watchman: Converting Solitary Anxiety into Strategic Leverage.”
This issue grew out of something I started noticing in my own solitary planning blocks. Once I removed the usual operational noise and created some real white space, my analytical mind did
It started with a routine task, as it usually does. I was using Claude to review a draft critique of an article I had some doubts about, checking the research behind a few of its assertions and testing its logic.
During the exchange, I noticed something simple: Claude was applying a strict standard of proof
The prevailing narrative I hear in the legal world is that Claude is the “most human” of the LLMs and, especially, a nuanced, sophisticated writer. When I report that the system has begun to fail my specific research protocols, the common response is a suggestion that I am simply using the wrong version and a
There are moments in a long AI session when the exchange stops feeling linear.
You are no longer simply asking a question and receiving an answer. You are no longer even refining a prompt in the ordinary sense. Something else begins to happen. Certain phrases return with altered weight. Certain errors recur, but not identically.
Coherence degrades while fluency improves.
The central problem is not that AI systems sometimes fail. Of course they fail. Nor is the main problem that they occasionally hallucinate, wander, or produce obvious nonsense. Those are manageable problems because they announce themselves early. The more interesting and professionally dangerous problem is that a system can become
At a certain point in a long AI session, I can feel the texture change.
The words are still smooth. The tone is still confident. But something underneath has started to slide and give way. The session is still moving forward, yet the logic is no longer holding together in the same way.
That happened
A lot of the most interesting work in legal tech seemed to be coming from people who were newer to the field, earlier in their careers, or just not as widely known yet as
I was in Silicon Valley recently for the initial meeting of the University of Michigan Law School AI Advisory Council. With a little free time around
