Interesting Links for 10-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. British Property Management Firms Are Helping Russians Avoid Sanctions

(tags:uk russia OhForFucksSake )

2. Amazon's warehose robots can now stow items faster than most humans

(tags:robots amazon )

3. Trans Labour councillor quits and accuses Starmer of 'throwing transgender people under a bus'

(tags:transgender lgbt labour )

4. Why the rich paid less tax in the 1970s - despite 98% tax rates

(tags:tax uk history )

5. "Letting AI make up cases" hits the UK legal system

(tags:law ai fraud OhForFucksSake uk )

6. The House of Lords wants opinions from autistic people (diagnosed or undiagnosed), or people who care for them.

(tags:autism houseoflords )

7. Scientists turn lead into gold at the LHC!

(tags:materials gold lead )

8. Always, always check the answers the AI gives you.

(tags:comic genocide funny ai )

9. Video Essay Condescendingly Reads Wikipedia at You

(tags:funny satire videos )

10. American men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'

(tags:USA politics )

Comments

[calimac]

8. A couple things about this mystify me. One is, whether AI generated the fake citations or not, where did they come from? But second and more important, why didn't someone note this earlier? I spent enough time working at a law school to pick up some of the lingo and principles, and one thing I picked up is that, when citing a case, you always check to make sure it's still current law, i.e. not been overruled by something subsequent. In the US this is, or was back then, called "shepardizing," because it meant to look it up in Shepard's Citations.
But I guess Shepard's would only list cases that have been cited, so if it's never been cited it wouldn't be there, so non-existence wouldn't ring an alarm.

[andrewducker]

As far as I can tell, these people aren't doing any checking at all. Sadly, the document has now been taken down, but the transcript of two lawyers getting torn apart by a judge for doing something similar a while back basically had them admit that they thought *the AI* was doing the checking.

[andrewducker]

Found the judge's order, which makes things clearer: https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/13/ai-hallucination-in-filings-involving-14th-largest-u-s-law-firm-lead-to-31k-in-sanctions/