Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. – Steve Jobs, Apple’s “Think Different” 1997 Ad
This past weekend, the ninth annual community sponsored MacStock Conference was held in a Chicago suburb. MacStock is a grassroots gathering for Apple enthusiasts. While it’s not a legal conference per se, it does have lots of content relevant to lawyers and legal professionals.
Thinking Differently About AI
While most lawyers think of AI as a glorified research assistant, a presentation at this year’s conference proved that we may be missing the real opportunity: using AI as a creative partner.
This point was brought home in a Friday presentation by Mike Schmitz. Schmitz is a young, bespectacled, and well-known content creator and productivity expert. His talk was entitled Think Different: Using AI as Your Creative Copilot.
I have to admit. When I saw the title, I thought great, another productivity guru is going to tell us the same old shit about AI, efficiency, automation, and cost savings.
Indeed, particularly in legal circles, AI is frequently referred to as a “co-pilot,” a sort of virtual assistant whose main use is to automate certain tasks like retrieving information and summarizing information. It can’t be used for more sophisticated stuff because it hallucinates and gets stuff wrong. In addition, without appropriate guidance, AI can create AI slop, material that anyone with half a brain can see came not from a human but from a bot. The overall result is a belief that AI can’t be used to augment and enhance creativity.
But when Schmitz took the stage wearing a simple black T-shirt that said “Create Every Day” on the front and started his talk by showing the famous Apple “Think Different” commercial from 1997, I suspected this was indeed going to be different.
Schmitz’s view is that the belief that AI can only do mundane tasks because it’s not totally reliable is myopic and limiting. His thesis is that the real value of AI is in fact its creative power. And the fact that it gets stuff occasionally wrong ignores that producing incorrect options is really part of the creative process. Schmitz believes we need to think about AI use more broadly. Differently: just as Jobs challenged conventional thinking about technology, lawyers need to fundamentally rethink their relationship with AI.
Schmitz told us we should be thinking about AI not just as a way to get work done more efficiently or to automate an end product but as a tool to produce higher quality work. AI can, in fact, give us superpowers that make it easier to crank out content and augment our creative processes.
Using AI to Enhance Creativity
Schmitz gave several ways he uses AI to enhance his creative process, some of which are well known but some were new, at least to me. Here’s a list of his suggestions that have relevance to legal.
1. Using AI to generate topic ideas and content. For lawyers, it could be ideas for a marketing pitch, a blog post, a motion, or a strategy. Schmitz suggested role playing with an AI tool. For example, making it play the role of a potential client with an issue and then asking the tool what questions it would have for you as a lawyer.
2. Getting suggestions for social posts. For example, if you want to get your name out as having a certain area of legal expertise, you could ask for help with social posts demonstrating that expertise. Or to post something you had written. Of course, you need to tell the tool who your audience is and what you want from it. When I thought about this afterwards, it dawned on me that the mere thinking through who my audience is and what I want them to do was revealing.
3. Arguing with AI. One intriguing suggestion is to actually argue with AI. Take a position on some issue and ask it to argue with the validity of that position. You could then debate it back and forth to flush out good and bad arguments. Great idea for lawyers and legal professionals. In fact, I tried it out after the talk and used it to draft a forthcoming post. (Stay tuned.)
4. Using it as a conversational partner. I had a client who was fond of saying let’s be careful that we do not end up in the closet talking to ourselves too much. Ideas in our heads often need to be said out loud to someone who can kick the tires and make us think. AI can play that role when the senior partner isn’t around. ChatGPT has this conversational feature; Schmitz suggested an app called VoicePal. I tried it and it appears much more robust and geared toward helping create content.
5. Use it to repurpose material. Often, we want to take something we have done in the past and then use it for another purpose. I do this fairly often and dread it. AI takes away a pain point.
6. Using it to prepare for anything. You can prompt the tool by telling it something like: you are my client who has a certain kind of problem. I am meeting with my actual client for the first time. What questions will they ask me? Or how about this: I am meeting a potential client for the first time, or my client is being deposed. What questions will they ask me or will the client be asked? How about this for a prompt: I am going to MacStock for the first time in years. I am a lawyer and a legal tech writer. What questions will many of the attendees ask me about at networking events once I tell them my background?
Schmitz also suggested using AI to help create your brand (and yes, lawyers need to brand themselves) and somewhat surprisingly to create video content.
The Real Point
Of course, all of these ideas are just starting points. Much of what is produced in the use of the tools can be obvious, off target, or just plain wrong. But AI is a way to jump start your creative process. (When I asked about the questions I might be asked by MacStock attendees, it gave me most of what I would expect. It did give me one I didn’t expect and was actually asked in a podcast interview at the conference.)
And that’s the point. As humans, we don’t just create a masterpiece off the top of our heads. We work through things. We try stuff out. We reject parts and accept parts. AI can help.
Even the idea that AI can be used to augment and enhance the creative process in and of itself can force us to be more creative in how and for what we use the tool.
And Those Hallucinations?
And oh yeah, those hallucinations that everyone fears and thinks of as a barrier? To Schmitz, they are part of the creative process. You come up with things and then you throw out the ones that are wrong or don’t make sense. So, let’s start thinking of AI as the key to creative content, not the barrier.
Think differently.
Here is a link to the materials and apps Schmitz referenced.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.