What are AI agents and how do they differ from AI apps most of us have been using for the past few years?
AI Chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are built on large language models. They respond to prompts and provide answers. They give us information, but don’t take any actions.
AI Agents are
Most lawyers encounter artificial intelligence through cloud services like Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT. They type a question, upload a document, and receive an answer produced on computers operated by someone else.
This arrangement is convenient. It also means that the lawyer is relying on an outside company to process the information, maintain appropriate security, follow
An AI agent can be attacked by an email you never open. No click. No download. No opened attachment. Just a “confused deputy,” an agent that has failed to distinguish a prompt from data, a problem known as prompt injection.
Security researchers recently demonstrated prompte injection mechanisms with
The obvious trap for a book about AI is that the rapid pace of new developments makes most books age quickly. It’s kind of like writing a treatise on current K-Pop stars.
Christopher Mims’ new book How to AI: Cut Through the Hype. Master the Basics. Transform Your Work will have more lasting value.
Prompt Injection is generally acknowledged as the most serious vulnerability in the deployment of AI apps, and AI agents in particular. The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), considered by many the world’s leading authority on web-facing system security risks, lists prompt injection as Number One on their list of the top ten
Agentic AI Conventional software keeps code (instructions) strictly separate from data (the files being processed). Large language models collapse the distinction. To an agent, both are just natural language. A firm’s internal policy and an incoming email are structurally similar. The model cannot reliably tell a document it is meant to read from an order
Christopher Mims’s new book, How to AI: Cut Through the Hype. Master the Basics. Transform Your Work stands out among the many AI books flooding the market.
Mims’s background and track record as a Wall Street Journal reporter covering technological advances give him the hype-resistance and, at least as important, the perspective to write about
When and why should presenters act like Phil Donahue? Sara Kubik knows.
Sara recently observed: “I anticipate having audience input and will actually encourage it. Like Phil Donahue style.”
Incorporating audience feedback can strengthen nearly any presentation.
One powerful technique expands on Sara’s approach:
I try to ask questions designed to lead audience members
The New York legislature–pressured by the organized bar–is on the verge of enacting restrictions that will make it difficult to use AI to close the access-to-justice gap. Even worse, this is merely one of many similar efforts elsewhere, some statutory and some regulatory.
It’s pretty ugly, since multiple studies have shown a continuing unmet need
The marketing promise for premium legal RAG-based models was a hallucination-free experience. The empirical reality is different. Why?
It is a structural problem, created by the way Large Language Models are created. The process includes inputting large amounts of information. This typically includes all the publicly available information on the Internet.
The next step is