TOGETHER WITH BALZAC.

Hello again, human brain, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• Judge shuts down AI lawyer🤡

  An entrepreneur tried to have AI represent him.

• Your AI creates busywork⏰

  Does AI really boost productivity?

  New here? Subscribe! 😎

Peep today's Spot the AI at the bottom. 👇

MAIN COURSE

Your AI lawyer sucks🤡

A New York judge scolded an entrepreneur's attempt to have an AI avatar present his case in court.

What happened?

Jerome Dewald, representing himself in an employment dispute, began playing a video of an AI-generated man addressing the court. The judge immediately shut it down.

Why would he do this?

Dewald claims his throat cancer from 25 years ago makes speaking difficult. He received permission to play a video, but didn't disclose it would feature an avatar instead of himself.

How did he make the avatar?

He tried to use the AI service Tavus to create a replica of himself. After technical difficulties, he settled for Jim, the default avatar.

What did the judge say?

Judge Manzanet-Daniels said, “You are not going to use this courtroom as a launch for your business.” She then ordered him to present his argument himself. He later filed an apology.

Who is Dewald?

An entrepreneur with a startup called Pro Se Pro that aims to help people navigate the legal system without lawyers. He has a background in engineering and computer science, but is not a lawyer.

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SIDE SALAD

Your AI wastes time⏰

AI isn’t increasing productivity in the workplace. It's creating more tasks for workers.

Where is this coming from?

The University of Chicago analyzed data from 25,000 workers across 11 industries.

What did they find?

Despite widespread AI adoption, “chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.” Any effects were smaller than 1 percent across all occupations.

Why isn't AI boosting productivity?

AI tools create new work for 8.4% of employees. Teachers have to spend time detecting AI-written homework. Workers now spend time reviewing AI outputs, crafting effective prompts, and more.

Does it save any time?

Users reported an average time savings of about one hour per week. This contradicts other studies showing 15% productivity increases.

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Think Piece 🧠

AI-piloted drone beat the world’s top pilots. TU Delft’s AI beat the world champion pilots in a landmark race.

Startup News 💰

Amazon launches Nova Premier. It features multimodal support, a 1M-token context window, and built-in model distillation for scalable enterprise use.

Suno launched v4.5. It is out for Pro & Premier users and features more genres, richer vocals, better prompt accuracy, and up to 8-minute songs.

Research 👨‍🔬 

WebThinker — equips large reasoning models with real-time web search, navigation, and report writing.

SadeedDiac-25 — a new benchmark for fairer evaluation across classical and modern Arabic.

MEME FOR DESSERT

SPOT THE AI

3 of these are real octopuses. 1 is fake. 🐙

Which one is AI-generated? 👇

Ideas? Comments? Complaints?

Respond to this email or hit me up on 𝕏.

Until next time 🤖😋🧠