Legal academic focused on AI & Copyright, and AI as a legal technology.
Atlanta
Joined May 2009
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Matthew Sag retweeted
We mourn the loss of Senior Lecturer Richard Allen Posner, a longtime #UChicagoLaw scholar, former federal appellate judge, and pioneer in the field of law and economics, who died on November 10.
Read more about his legacy: buff.ly/e3c3WdL
ALT In loving memory of Richard Posner 1939-2026
I get a lot of spam email from other law schools, and I just noticed that I had to block dean@law.[school withheld].edu. That really seems suboptimal. Please don't send law school spam from your dean account.
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Matthew Sag retweeted
Dear software designers: I *always* want to open the link in my default browser, and I *always* want to paste the text unformatted. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Matthew Sag retweeted
Had Claude estimate CO2 emissions per dollar by where you spend it, including AI tokens. Not super reliable but if someone wants to take this further this is yet another argument that people should really be trying AI models to see what they can do (and hopefully see that they are in fact quite disturbingly powerful)
Amen
In which I come out swinging against Canvas. Canvas is why students prefer AI to their professors, and I don't blame them one bit. hollisrobbinsanecdotal.subst…
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Claude will sometimes make very strange choices in an empirical project if you tell it to be cost-conscious about model selection and token spend.
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Matthew Sag retweeted
Another blow to legal scholarship's traditional model. It takes 12 - 18 months to write and publish an article. By then the models may have changed too much for your original claims to survive. And model development is accelerating.
How long does a finding about LLMs stay true?
A new paper re-tested 50 widely cited findings about LLM behavior (biases, hallucination, sycophancy, etc).
Within 15 months, most no longer held or had substantially reduced effects. The shelf life of LLM findings is short.
Almost half (44%) of the tested claims are now expired in today’s models, 34% are weakener, 16% persisted, and 6% have strengthened relative to the original claim
The only effects that got stronger were about sycophancy, LLM ingroup bias, and creativity.
This means we should be cautious when interpreting the long term durability of research on LLMs.
zou-group.github.io/llm-clai…
I was astonished to read an amicus brief citing the disgraced whack-a-mole paper in the open AI litigation.
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I filed an amicus brief in the OpenAI copyright litigation. If you want to read a summary matthewsag.com/amicus-brief-… but the original is only 6,000 words. matthewsag.com/wp-content/up…
Matthew Sag retweeted
FYI, if you are using ChatGPT for bluebooking / citation formatting, it will add a reference to itself in the hyperlink. This makes it look like you used ChatGPT to find the source even if you didn't. It's not visible in the text or CTRL-F but is visible if you click or hover over the link. You can remove it by right clicking, "edit hyperlink" and deleting "&utm_source" and everything that follows it.
loc.closertotruth.com/essay/… I have unlocked my lifelong dream of being cited in an essay on double consciousness.
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Matthew Sag retweeted
A consequential choice will be made soon by government and companies as they are increasingly flooded with agentic AI inquiries that overcome the frictions that gated access (see the graphs - it has already started!)
Two options: do you make services worse or better as a result?
I had an idea for a start up a couple of weeks ago. Thought it over for a bit. Wrote a plan for the site in a faculty meeting. Built it with @claudeai in a day. Expect to soft launch next week. These are amazing times!
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Agree 💯 matthewsag.com/the-unwritten…
After reading AI-written slop, my brain feels so exhausted (or grossed out) that I have to cleanse the palate by reading something written before the invention of the internet.
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Matthew Sag retweeted
Here’s a useful test for any AI bill:
Could a university lab or two-person startup actually comply with it?
If the answer is “only if they have the legal budget of the biggest AI companies in the world,” you’re not making AI safer.
You’re entrenching the biggest labs.
@neil_chilson
My brother Dave, sci fi author who studied computer science in the 80s, worked as a virtual artist in the 90s, and still work as a software engineer has some thoughts on copyright and AI davesag.substack.com/p/who-o…
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The funny thing is that FERPA makes it impractical for universities to provide this directly
Anthropic released a law student plugin. It's designed to act as a tutor, but it will brief cases, build outlines, predict exam questions based on sample exams, and many other skills.
I'll show you how to install it in the comments. You should expect your students are using this. You should probably use it for your footnotes.
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Getty Images to File for Bankruptcy, Go Private In Restructuring Deal hollywoodreporter.com/busine…
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Matthew Sag retweeted
A common assumption is that people use AI as a shortcut. Stanford HAI Faculty Affiliate @Diyi_Yang and her team analyzed a quarter-million anonymized chatbot conversations and found most users stay engaged, asking for explanations, working through friction, and refining their work: hai.stanford.edu/news/humans…
