← The 404 Media Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access in worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co founders, Sam Cole.
- [00:34]
B
Hello.
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A
Emmanuel Mayberg.
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C
Hello.
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A
And Jason Kebler.
- [00:39]
D
You sound clearer to me. You sound like you're coming in at high def.
- [00:43]
A
It's maybe because I'm standing up. I have one of those converters where I can move the desk up if I want.
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D
Maybe now your windpipes are different. They're unconstricted.
- [00:55]
A
Exactly. Lungs, diaphragm, windpipe. It's. I mean, I feel a lot better standing up. I spend so much time in front of this computer talking to all sorts of strange, unusual, fascinating people, but I'm usually cramped up in my chair. So, yeah, I think it's much better to be standing up now. Don't you have a standing desk, Jason?
- [01:16]
D
I do. Should I stand? Are we standing?
- [01:18]
A
Yeah, go for it. Well, Sam's going to ask me.
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D
I'm going to convert.
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B
I will not be standing.
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C
I'll be lying down.
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A
Sure. Well, Sam is going to ask me the questions for this, while Jason, for those that are watching on YouTube, can see his camera slowly moving up.
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D
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A
Sam do you want to take the headline of this?
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B
Yep. So the story headline is landlords demand tenants workplace logins to scrape their pay stubs. A lot happening in that headline and a lot of things to instantly get upset about in that headline. But we'll unpack it. I mean, I guess I'm curious if anybody else has ever had like a wild landlord experience. Like if there's anything insane that landlords have had you do to get an apartment. I mean, I feel like New York City landlords, it's like the most degrading experience.
- [03:50]
C
It's also the most expensive is what I was going to say that the poorest of bin was actually not when I was making the least money I've made, but when I was moving to an apartment in New York. And it's like first security, security deposit, I think it was also last and then also the fee for the broker. And it's like brokers fees is like.
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D
The fucking biggest scam out there. Which I know they've tried to legislate away several times but still exists as.
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C
Far as I know. Every time you think it's going to go away and then they're like, psych, we're actually keeping it. But yeah, that was like all our money. Me and my wife said it was all our money. And I don't remember, I don't know if Jason remembers, but there was like a month in the vice office where I was eating rice and beans and that was because I literally had no money because I was moving. And then also I was going to say like first apartment I got. The most humiliating thing is I had to have my parents co sign because I was a child and they're like, didn't trust me to pay the rent.
- [04:49]
A
I love how you're like, yes, the landlords or the brokers or whatever took all my money so I had to eat rice and beans. And I'm like, that's just literally why.
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D
Every single day just your favorite food. Yeah, I've. I proudly have never had to pay a broker fee. Like I always managed to somehow find one without. But I feel like if you're trying not to do a broker's fee in New York City, then you're very limited on like which places you can get. My story is like, I haven't had any that crazy. But the like the situation in New York City with apartments is always that you go and you look at the apartment and there's like the genre of apartment, that's street easy disappointment, where it's like the pictures look nice but they're all like taken from like 0.5 zoom and so they look a lot bigger than they actually are. And then it's like, you know, in a weird basement with like weird lighting or something or it's just like obviously going to be infested by rodents or something like that. But the situation in New York is like when you find a good apartment, you basically have to like commit to one living there and then also as Emmanuel said, giving like a ton of money kind of instantly. Like I remember the longest that I've ever delegated or deliberated on an apartment was like 20 minutes in New York. Like that's as long as you're allowed to like think about it. Otherwise it's gone. And so when we moved into apartment in la, I have a good rent controlled place here now. And when I was looking at this apartment there was like 15 other people looking at it and they were asking the broker, like the person who was showing it things like, oh, like, are you going to keep these cabinets? Or like does the refrigerator, like can you replace the refrigerator? And I was like, there's no way, like you just, you throw money at them immediately. And like we came with our application ready, like checks ready because I had like learned from New York City. So just like immediately there's no thinking. It's just like we live here now, like we're moving in right now. Like, here's all of our stuff.
- [06:56]
B
They don't even have to give you a fridge in la, which is wild to me, or a stove or any of that shit. It's very, very crazy coming from New York where I think usually if you see a fridge in an apartment, that's your fridge if you're viewing the apartment. I've definitely turned down apartments because of broker fees before because they, they didn't do anything. They didn't even unlock the apartment. They were like, here's a lockbox. $900, please. So this story came to you, Joe, through a tip, which is how many of our best stories arise. What was the tip?
- [07:34]
A
Yeah, so I mean everything you just said, all of those, it totally sucks. But now landlords are being like even more invasive it seems. Whereas before maybe you just have to prove something about your Income or show them, hey, I do have a full time job or even several part time jobs. I can pay the rent. And you have to prove that. I got this tip that somebody in Georgia, they were a potential renter, a potential tenant and they tried to rent an apartment and, and it was one of the most invasive things I believe they've seen and that I've definitely heard about, which is that they were basically forced to hand over the login credentials not for their own bank account, which you might do. You connect it with plaid or whatever it's called. You can verify your income that way. They were told to. You have to hand over the login credentials for your employer's sort of workday instance. And Workday is this horrible tool that we're all very, very familiar with having to having worked at Vice. We don't have workday 404 media, we don't have Concord, we don't have any of these big corporate tools. But they had to hand over those login details. And these various companies and tools that we'll talk about in a minute, they just would scrape their pay stubs en masse even though to get the apartment they were told, oh, you just need to show, I think it was two months or something for pay stubs if you're being paid every two weeks or whatever it is. Right. The tip was these tools are scraping way, way more information than is actually required to get the apartment. The person doesn't really know what happens with that data. And they sent me a bunch of screenshots to prove it as well.
- [09:33]
B
Yeah, the amount of like software as a service involved in getting an apartment is also increasing and egregious. So this, the software we're talking about here is called Approved Shield. What does Approved Shield actually do?
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A
Yeah, so Approved Shield is the first part and they're basically like a tenant screening service. And I'm looking at their website now and of course it's marketed to landlords and the idea is that you outsource verification of your potential tenants to us and we'll use various pieces of technology or whatever to do that. And Approved Shield says it can again, just reading the website now, dramatically reduce eviction rates, transform tenant profiles within a year. Which I presume means you change sort of people renting your apartment. You don't change the profile of the person. Exactly. You reduce bad debt and delinquency. All of these sorts of promises. I almost see it kind of like these anti fraud companies. Almost like a KYC company as well know your customer. But it's really for landlords who are trying to figure out who is this person who is trying to rent in my building or my apartment, do they have enough money? And frankly, do I want them to be renting from me? And I'm definitely going to look into these companies more. There's a bunch more. Approved shield is not unique whatsoever. But that's just the one that this tipster happened to be told, hey, if you want to rent this apartment in Georgia, you have to go through these steps.
- [11:19]
B
Yeah. So what happened when they actually did go through the approved shield process?
- [11:23]
A
Yeah, so they go through it and this little widget is how they described it. It starts to use another tool called argyl. And we'll talk about them in a minute. But Argyll A R G Y L E the tipster said they watched Argyle hijack their workday session again. They had to provide the login details for their employer's workday. It stayed hidden from view, and then it downloaded every pay stub plus all of their W4s back to 2024. They know this because in their email they kept getting these notifications from workday saying, hey, your pay stub from XYZ date is ready to be printed. And you know, when you export data out of workday, you have to maybe wait a little bit or something like that. Same with Google. T take out. You get a little email notification telling you it's ready. And I saw this screenshot and there's like 14, at least 14 notifications there. Obviously, that is way, way more than the four pay stubs necessary to actually rent this apartment. And then, you know, they or their employer went through workday audit logs as well, and they found that it was from two IP addresses that are not theirs, obviously, and also from a Mac address. And a Mac address is just a unique identifier for a device on a network. You can cycle Mac addresses. Sometimes iPhones do that, as far as I know. But basically the takeaway was he'd given these login details to approve shield because his landlord said he had to. Then this other company he's never heard of, mass downloads all of his data in a pretty sketchy way. This is something you would usually associate with some sort of mass web scraper or something, but it went in and it downloaded all of this data. So then they. They contacted me.
- [13:26]
B
Very crazy. I would be freaking out if workday was just like downloading pay stubs through the years without my permission.
- [13:34]
A
Well, it looks like you've been hacked.
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B
What is going on? Yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, I would be. I would be panicking. Do we know of any other companies that are like doing something along the same lines? I'm scared to even ask that or know to answer to that because I'm sure the answer is yes.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah, there's a few more. There's one called Pay Score, which someone else actually contacted me about and I need to follow up with them and look into what they showed me. There's Nova Credit, which judging by the name and my cursory look of the website, and I'll look more into them. They're not just about tenant approval and their leadership actually includes a co founder of Argylle as well. So there's a connection there. And then another one called Snapt with a T, not an ed, also uses Argylle. So clearly you have all of these different tenant screening companies selling their services to landlords or buildings or whatever. Then Argyll, which is the actual company in the tool doing this pretty unusual sketchy scraping, is working with a bunch of them or you know, at least two of them it seems, if not more. Yeah.
- [14:54]
D
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- [18:22]
A
Yeah, that's a fair point. I think that Argyle would say hey, we're no different from Plaid. And Plaid for those who don't know is basically an API and a tool for linking up lots of different payment systems at once. So let's say, I don't know, you use an accounting firm and they need to look at all of your different accounts. I think you can do it like that. I've used it to link up various different accounts before as well. So Argyle I think would say hey, we're no different to them. What does make them a little bit different? And I'll just answer this question now Since Jason brought brought it up, Argyle has done some pretty unusual stuff or is connected to some pretty unusual stuff. So I actually covered Argyl several years ago back when we were all at Motherboard, the tech section of Vice. And for that there were all of these very weird phishing pages going around where they would send emails to people or there'd just be web pages and they would say, hey, are you an employee of JP Morgan? Give us your workday login details and we'll give you 100 bucks. Because we're trying to democratize financial data. I think there was also stuff around gig workers as well, and it was an organization called Workers Unite, very progressive, labor focused, lefty branding. A bunch of security researchers that I spoke to at the time found this very odd. And, and I then went in as well and analyzed some of the web traffic and you could see that there were connections between Workers unite's website and argyll.com if I'm remembering correctly and said, well, what the hell is this financial company, which was a startup, why are they connected to this? They never responded. When I started to write about it and security researchers found out about it, the site suddenly went offline. So was Argylle running it and harvesting data? Was it one of their clients? I don't know, but they were really strongly to that sort of thing. If anyone knows Plaid doing something like that, let me know. Or if you know about another Argyll sort of operation connected to that doing similar, let me know. But that was really unusual. They were straight up phishing pages and I hadn't seen Plaid or any of the other companies do that. And that's why I was interested in this in the first place.
- [20:55]
B
Insane. I wonder if a lot of this is also. These things are effective because people are just so used to having to like connect your accounts to do like literally anything online. It's like earlier today I was like trying to connect to like a, an app that compares Uber and Lyft prices and it wanted me to connect my Uber login and my Lyft login. I was like, why do you need that? That's information that is publicly available if you don't have a login. But like they benefit from getting your. Your data that way. So I wonder if people are just like used to, I don't know, their privacy being invaded basically constantly hope. I mean, ideally these apps are not doing things without users consent when they connect that way. But you know, they're like privacy gateways that are involved. But I don't know, it's why Something like this is successful, I would think, or part of why.
- [21:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, once you give over those login details, you don't necessarily. I mean, you don't, you don't know what Argyle or Approved Shield or is going to do with them. Are they going to log in once and just scrape all the data one time? They're already scraping more data than is necessary by the landlord. Handing over those creds could create all sorts of problems for you.
- [22:11]
B
Crazy. So are there like. I mean, this sounds, it sounds illegal to me, but like. And it sounds like it could also be something that could get people into legal trouble in both directions. What are the kind of the legal implications around something like this?
- [22:30]
A
Yeah, when I covered Argyll way back with those phishing pages, we included a couple of paragraphs that this sure looks like it could violate U.S. hacking law, which is the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, the cfaa. And very broadly generally speaking, you can't share login credentials that you do not have author to share, basically. So let's say it's your own Facebook profile and maybe you give your login creds to your partner or something because you want to be locked out of your Facebook profile. Seems pretty unlikely that anyone would prosecute that. Of course, there's two things. Is it a crime and is it a crime anyone's going to prosecute? I really think people super care about that. Now if you are an employer, and we'll just use Vice as the example, when we were back at Vice and we were logging into workday that contains all of this information, not just about us, but about the company as well. Right. There's org charts in there, all this corporate information. If any one of us took those credentials and then basically gave them to another company, I mean, at the minimum you're going to get yelled at, maybe you're going to get fired because that's a serious security concern. And also potentially there's a legal issue there as well. And of course, I mean, since Argyll exists, I'll give them the slight benefit of the doubt and that they have probably got lawyers who said this is okay, but they've never responded to my request for comment. So I don't know. And I would love to hear their argument on this if they're able to provide it. But if I'm argyl and I'm using those login details to go into a workday that Vice or whoever the employer has, has not given me authorization to do, maybe Argyle is committing a crime there as well. So, yeah, there's this legal stuff, but really I'm kind of worried about the workers that you give over your details. Your security team is like, what the fuck is this? And what is this system logging into our workday? Yeah, that could cause real, real issues for it. And to be clear, I haven't heard that happening. But the response to this article has been, well, people are pissed because it's got landlords in there, it's got hacking in there, it's got weird startup doing phishing pages as well or being connected to phishing pages as well. It's nuts all around.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, it's got a little something horrifying for everybody which is a classic 4.4Media blog. Yeah. Anything else on Argyle? I guess if you're Argyle, please hit up Joseph. If you have gotten in trouble because of Argyle, please hit up Joseph. But yeah. Anything else to add on this? Or should we move to the next horrifying story from four. Four Media?
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A
Yeah, nothing to add. Plenty more horrors to come after the break when we're going to talk about how lawyers, well rather lawyers are now admitting it and saying why they've been using AI after they've been caught. We'll be right back after this.
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D
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- [28:36]
A
All right, and we are back. I'll take the questions this time. Jason, this is one you wrote, I believe, with Jules as well. And the headline is 18 lawyers caught using AI explain why they did it. You and Sam as well have been all over. Lawyers, judges, in some cases as well, using AI in lots of different ways. It seems to be maybe crisis is too strong, but it keeps coming up in the legal profession. So hold off the reasons from these 18 lawyers, first of all. But just like, what are lawyers actually using AI for? Is it writing briefs? Or like, what are they actually using it for?
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D
First of all, yeah, so I think we've talked about this at some point on the podcast. Sam has definitely written about this a few times. But back in, like 2018, I wrote an article about how AI was going to revolutionize the legal profession, which is just to say that was eight years ago, like seven, eight years ago. And for a very long time, it's like everyone in law keeps sort of saying, like, LLMs are going to fundamentally change the job. And the job, of course, like most of the job of a lawyer is researching and writing, you know, very little. Lawyering is actually like going to trial and arguing in front of a judge. It's a lot of writing briefs It's a lot of researching arguments, things like that. If you're watching on YouTube, my camera keeps overheating.
- [30:10]
A
I just saw that.
- [30:12]
D
Yeah, it's very hot out here. So sorry about that. But I will be back on there. I am. So. I mean, there's an entire industry or part of the industry that's paralegals, that's legal assistants that are interns, people who are. Whose entire job is to research precedent and other cases and things like that. And AI sort of promises to do all of that for you. And, like, the entire currency of law firms is, like, billable hours. So it's like, how long are you spending on any given thing? And so, like, nominally, if you can replace a lot of this work with AI, you can, like, maybe charge the same. I mean, I've talked to a lot of lawyers, and so it's like, really a big ethical question. It's like, are you charging people the same amount of money even if you're using AI? But then you also have clients who are saying, why are you charging me so much money for all this research time? Just use AI to find the case that you're citing, things like that. So it's a mix. Lawyers are using it to do their research, but then they're also using it to write the briefs, and that is the actual legal arguments that end up getting filed in court. And so what has happened is judges keep finding lawyers who have written briefs where they cite cases that don't exist, where they're basically just like, hallucinating precedent, hallucinating laws, like citing laws that don't exist, things like that. I don't know if I mentioned this ever, but I actually, like, had a landlord beef with my own apartment, but I needed to, like, file something. And so for the first. Really, this is the first time I ever tried to use ChatGPT. But I asked it to write me, like, a legal brief to, like, fight with the landlord. And I got something back that looked like a legal letter. And I then cited, like, I checked the citations that it. It said, and almost none of them were real. And when they were real, they were referring to. They were referring to real laws, but they were not, like, interpreting that law correctly. Like, they were referring to real laws, but then they were saying that it said something, like, totally incorrect. So anyways, a lot of lawyers have been doing this over the last few years, and there's a database now of lawyers who've been caught doing this, and it's over 400 worldwide. It's not just the US problem. But the vast majority of them have.
- [32:49]
A
Been in the US and you, presumably, you're in this database as well, considering you just admitted that you used.
- [32:58]
D
I never filed that. I never used anything.
- [33:00]
A
Oh, okay.
- [33:00]
D
Okay.
- [33:01]
A
Yeah. You proofread it, and you were like, wow, this is complete garbage. I'm not even going to.
- [33:04]
D
And I threw in the trash.
- [33:05]
A
Yeah, right. Okay. So there's this database which you reference. I believe it's linked to in the story as well. Why was this useful? Because it contains all these cases where lawyers have been caught. And then what did you do after that?
- [33:23]
D
Yeah. So the researcher's name, Damien Charlatan. He's in Europe. I forget exactly where, but I spoke to him before doing this story. And he has been documenting all of the cases where a judge has basically been like, hey, you used AI. You should not have used AI. You cited a case that didn't exist. And he has a really awesome database that sort of, like, explains what happened in each of these cases. But what Damien does is he summarizes, like, what the AI use was, and he pulls, like, one document from each of those court cases. But what he doesn't do, and I understand why, is he doesn't pull the documents where the lawyers are forced to apologize and explain why they used AI because basically, in each case, the judge is like, you filed a nonsense brief that hallucinated AI. Why did you do that? You have to correct it. You have to apologize. You have to say why you shouldn't be sanctioned, which means either you could be disbarred. In some cases, I don't think lawyers have been disbarred yet, but some have been suspended, some have had fines, things like that. And so I went in and, Jules, we sort of split them up, and we tried to find the document where the lawyers apologized and explained, like, why they used AI And I thought that that was really eye opening because there has been quite a lot of reporting about the fact that lawyers are using AI but not a lot about, like, the underlying impulses as to why they're doing it.
- [35:04]
A
Yeah. And their reasons for doing it, which we'll go into next, are different from what they're using it for. You know what I mean? What they're using it for, as you said, is writing briefs or doing research or apparently lighting their careers on fire when the AI fabricates case law or whatever. So what are. What are some of these reasons? Because I was kind of surprised at how varied a lot. It's not as simple as. I don't know. I didn't feel like doing it. Like, there's a lot of actual different reasons going on here.
- [35:39]
D
Yeah, I mean, I guess to summarize, it's like the reasons are almost uniformly very bad. Like, the vibe is like, the dog ate my homework. Almost, like, entirely. Like, they all, not all, but the vast majority of them, try to come up with some really extenuating circumstances for why they used AI. Some of them said that they weren't. They didn't know that AI could hallucinate. Like, they were unclear that this was even possible. Like, a lot of them sort of explained themselves to be not technical or, like, they've never. Like, they thought that ChatGPT was doing something different than it actually was. A lot of them use LexisNexis products or Westlaw products, which are. They are legal products. And so they're marketed to lawyers. And nominally they're supposed to be, like, pretty good at not hallucinating, but in some cases they do. And then a lot of.
- [36:36]
A
Sorry, just on that. So the LexisNexis product, the legal product that might have ChatGPT or some sort of AI integrated in it as well, Is that what they're saying?
- [36:50]
D
So LexisNexis, well, it's not Nexus. It's like Lexis is a gigantic database company that has a bunch of different products for researchers, including some for lawyers. And they have several different legal products, and some of them are legal research tool products, and they have begun incorporating AI into those products. Westlaw, similarly, is a huge database that I believe is made by Thomson Reuters, like, just massive, massive company. And these are really, really expensive pieces of software. And over the last few years, they have begun integrating AI and LLMs into their products. And so I can't speak specifically to these two products because I haven't used them, although I've talked to lawyers who use them. But they've started integrating, like, hey, use our products to do your research. I think they may have started saying, like, use these to help write your briefs. Although maybe we haven't gotten that far with Lexis and Westlaw. But there's definitely, like, a lot of software companies that are, like, heavily marketing their products to lawyers and saying, like, we use a bespoke AI that won't hallucinate, or we use this bespoke AI that will, like, help you write the perfect brief, like, really quickly. So in some cases, you have lawyers who are using ChatGPT. In some cases you have them using Microsoft Copilot. There was one who used Grok Rip to that guy that's a good one. Yeah.
- [38:27]
A
You gotta fire your lawyer if they're using Grok.
- [38:29]
D
If they're using Grok. Yeah. It's not a good situation. That person was fired. Find a lot of money. The one that used Grok, one person.
- [38:37]
B
Was like, the hot anime girl Grok. Or was it like.
- [38:40]
D
Yeah, exactly. Cosplaying is a lawyer. Yeah, There was one that was also using Grammarly, which is, like, a grammar tool that has started including AI stuff in it, I guess. And it's like, I don't know if your lawyers like using Grammarly to write their. Their briefs. Prob should get a better lawyer.
- [39:04]
A
Yeah.
- [39:06]
D
But anyways, the. The excuses that they make are all over the place. Like, one person said that they were suffering from vertigo. That was my favorite one.
- [39:17]
A
Well, heads and malware as well.
- [39:21]
D
Yes. So he apologized for his failure to identify the errors in his affirmation, but partly blames, quote, a serious health challenge since the beginning of this year, which has proven very persistent, which most of the time leaves me internally cold and unable to maintain a steady body temperature, which caused me to be dizzy and experienced bouts of vertigo and confusion. The lawyer then goes on to say that he was, quote, affected by malware and unauthorized remote access. And so he blames both vertigo and the fact that he was hacked.
- [39:53]
A
I was with them up until the malware bit. Like, we're not going to mock anybody's legitimate medical condition. I have no idea whether it's real or not.
- [40:02]
D
But, I mean, I'm not mocking their medical condition, but having a medical condition.
- [40:06]
A
Doesn'T mean you have to use AI.
- [40:08]
D
You have to use AI.
- [40:09]
C
I feel like, overall, you're being very generous to, like, the general tone of these. I read this. I edited this piece before we published, and I was really laughing, like, actually laughing at the reasons. There's, like, only two categories of excuses, and it's like, one of them is apologies. Your honor, I'm a moron. You know what I mean? It's just like, I don't understand AI or I'm stupid. And I just, like, I'm really, really sorry I fucked up. Like, that's literally, like.
- [40:44]
D
That's like half of them.
- [40:45]
C
Yeah, apologizing. And then the other one is not better. It's just people throwing their paralegals and assistants under the bus. Like, literally just saying, it's like, my assistant did it. What a moron. And that's entirely unfair. And it's like, still your responsibility. And, like, don't you need to read the briefs before you file?
- [41:03]
D
Them.
- [41:03]
C
And don't you need to read, like, the court documents you're presenting to a judge? The only, like, the only thing I'll give them. And I think the thing it says about generative AI more generally is some people are like, hey, man, it's like, this was advertised as a thing that I can use, so I trusted that I can use it, and it turns out I can't. And it's like, that's definitely not good enough. And you still have to read the stuff that you generate and make sure it's accurate. But I think it does say something about how generative AI is advertised and used. And we report about how bad it is all the time. But this is like a great reminder that some people are just taking that advertising for its word and using it and not even thinking that something could go wrong. Because, like, why would OpenAI, this gigantic company run by these geniuses, make tools that don't work and make up case law? It's like, a lot of people don't know that.
- [42:03]
D
And to be fair, like, I'm going to do more articles on this. I was trying to, like, put it all in one article, but it was impossible. But one of the lawyers that was caught was forced to go to, like, an AI class with the Texas State Bar. And I was able to get a copy of the class that they had to go to. And that class is just like, five AI companies being like, use our AI like, it's. It is. They are getting heavily marketed to. And even since I published this, you know, this morning, as we're recording this, lawyers have been forwarding me the, like, marketing emails that they're getting from not just AI companies, but from legal organization, continuing education organizations within the law profession, being like, you want to be more efficient, use AI. Another thing is five different people blame Internet outages or IT problems. And they're like, we are checking with it at the office to see how this could have possibly happened. So, yeah, I mean, it really is, like, wasn't my fault. Your honor, like, pass the buck situation in.
- [43:17]
C
There are gremlins in my computer.
- [43:18]
D
Yeah. And then the other really notable one was someone who claimed that they created that they filed it as a, quote, legal experiment.
- [43:27]
A
Oh, right. I'm testing you.
- [43:29]
D
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a fun piece to do. It took forever. This took so long to do. Like, it took us months to put this together, like, off and on. And not because it was difficult, but because our court system is so fucked up that, like, finding the correct document to pull in any given case took a lot of things, a lot of time. And then a lot of them were at like state court. And so it's not just navigating pacer, which is like the expensive shitty US federal court system records that is bad. But I at least know how to use. It's like figuring out like Michigan system. It's like basically every little quote in here was like the 15th click on the worst website that you've ever used. And so that's why it took like a long time to put together. But it was very eye opening for me, I think because in a lot of cases, like straight up, these lawyers are just like, I don't know what I'm doing, like, I'm a giant dumbass. That's why I did this.
- [44:35]
A
Well, you answered what was going to be my last question, which is do any take responsibility? And as Emmanuel said, there's a lot of throwing under the bus, but it sounds like some of them just throw their hands up and be like, yeah, whatever. I just want to ask, well, what has the reception been like? You said more lawyers now send you this marketing material. Are you getting even more emails from. From lawyers who either their coworkers done this or maybe they've done it themselves or what's the reaction been?
- [45:04]
D
Yeah, I mean, people have said it's interesting. I think, unfortunately, I was hoping that more lawyers would reach out with like a lot of the lawyers are like, I want to talk to you on the phone. Which is good and helpful, except it's hard when like 30 different people, they're like, we should talk, but I won't tell you. What about Classic Lawyer. Classic Lawyer. They're like, let's get on the phone. But like, I can't tell you any details about what it, what it is.
- [45:30]
B
They'Re gonna bill you after.
- [45:31]
D
Exactly. And so, I mean, there, there will be more to come. But like when I wrote about teachers using AI, a lot of them like followed up with very well written, very honest and open, like communications about AI in schools. Whereas, like a lot of these lawyers, like, I want to talk to you, but let's do a briefing first. And so we'll see how this goes. But yeah, if you're a lawyer, if you are a paralegal, if you work in big law, if you are being pushed AI or have used AI, or have been asked to use AI, I would love to hear from you. My signal is Jason404, email is Jason04Media.
- [46:15]
A
Co. Yeah, I definitely would be curious if there are more people who say, well, I used it not from the advertising but because we're being told by our law like leadership, our law firm or something like that we're seeing in other companies or something like that. Really, really fascinating piece. People should go read really the full thing and go through and see some of the responses. We'll leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 404Media subscriber or we're going to talk about all of the drama surrounding the Rubri programming ecosystem and why it's actually, you know, really, really important for the Internet, the web and everything on it, essentially, you can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. Here is one of those some of the best in the game. This podcast is the purest nourishment for this hungry brain. It's that simple. That is all. And then there's two brain emojis and the word feed me. That's from rabble rousing RSA Za. Thank you so much. We'll see you again next week.