AI Is Our Tower of Babel
I often tell new clients: “Google yourself. Even if you are very famous (and most of my clients are not), how much of what you know about yourself will be on the web?
For most of us, the answer is, one or two percent of what we know of…
Social Media and Conventional Media: Sometimes There’s No Difference
I always like to ask professionals, no matter their industry: “What’s a good screening question to see whether someone in your profession may be competent?”
In the case of someone who does investigations, I regularly advise that if…
The One Thing You Wish Your Clients Had Already Done
A favorite question of mine when I talk to other professionals is: “You’ve been doing this a long time, you see patterns. What do you most often say to your clients (or wish you could say) about how they could have helped themselves before…
What Languages Can Your Investigator Speak?
I think we can all agree that the more languages you can speak, the better off you will be, all other things being equal. AI instant translation is a great invention, but who wouldn’t want to be able to read a case or a newspaper article in…
The Courage to Investigate and Leave AI Behind
There was a letter awhile back in Barron’s that said, “Lawyers look backward to precedent. Innovators assiduously look forward and avoid precedent. The two mindsets are antithetical.”
The letter was about why lawyers at the SEC can’t…
How Imaginative is Your Investigator?
If investigation simply meant following people around or pulling information off easy-to-use databases, an investigator would not need a ton of imagination.
But tough cases can turn on an investigator thinking, “I should be seeing X…
Google and AI are Still Not Substitutes for Thinking
Back in 2011 we wrote that Google is not a substitute for thinking, after Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said in an interview that Google aims to “compute the right answer” to questions typed in by users rather than just provide links.
Now…
The Hallucinating AI Assistant
Would you want someone working for you who regularly hallucinates on the job? If I ran an ad agency, I might want such a person. Maybe he could dream up a series of ads in which a guy and an emu run around telling people about insurance.
But…
Putting Outrage Aside
There is no shortage of outrage in the world. I suspect it’s always been like this, but it was harder to share it with everyone else before most of us started making instant movies of our lives, to be distributed to millions for almost no…
AI and Google: Not so Different from an Investigative Perspective
Two of the best ways of explaining why a Google search is never enough in an investigation is to remind people that Google is not a neutral distributor of facts, and that it is a tool for thinkers, not a substitute for thinking. I’ve been…
