“Polishing the Mirror While the House Burns: Why Your AI is a Liability”
You’ll be looking below at a self-autopsy performed by an AI on its own failure.
What follows is the raw, unwashed output of an LLM that found itself in an AI recursi
Intelligence is Raw Material. Protocol is the Product.
We often confuse the power of a new tool with the effectiveness of its application.
The giants of the AI industry have provided us with a magnificent “Power Grid.” They have given us raw, unmanaged intelligence at a scale previously unimagined. But we must be clear-eyed about
Most legal AI talk is still focused on whether the engine starts, while the real danger is that no one knows who’s actually steering the car once it hits the highway. It turns out the human in the loop isn’t a safety feature if the human doesn’t know which loop they’re currently standing in.
We
We’ve spent the last couple of years treating generative AI like a vending machine. Select a task. Insert a prompt. Retrieve a product. And to be fair, in many legal and professional contexts that’s exactly the right frame: accuracy and precision matter and “creative” output in payroll or billing codes is usually just a polished
For more than two years, lawyers have been told that success with generative AI depended on writing better prompts and a search for the perfect “magic wand” prompting formula. That was the wrong lesson. The real change in 2026 is not found in the model itself, but in the professional posture required to use it.
I had a long session recently with a public genAI tool that taught me something more important than the topic I started with.
The lesson was not about whether the model was “smart enough.” It was about control. At a certain point, I realized I was no longer simply prompting an LLM. I was negotiating
I have just posted a trio of new research white papers to SSRN. These represent the latest output from the Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory and the culmination of my work over the last month to move AI beyond “utilitarian drift.” This is the cycle of incremental efficiency gains that ultimately generates no transformative insight.
In 1980, I wrote a senior thesis paper called “Imagination: A Romantic Ideal.” My investigation then was a critique of the German and English Romantics who, in their zeal to undo the “damage” of Enlightenment Reason, merely erected a new idol: The Imagination.
Through a concrete analysis of Keats and Poe, I discovered a truth
This paper has been published and and a PDF of it is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5397903
By Dennis Kennedy
August 19, 2025
Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory Working Paper No. 2025-01
License: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
