Yonathan Arbel

(1) We are likely on track to develop AI systems capable of causing human extinction/permanent disempowerment, quite possibly within the next few years

This is a bad policy. Lots of people are calling it unenforceable. They're almost right, but that's not the real issue. It's a bad policy because it's bad pedagogy. First, a prediction: Berkeley walks this back within three years. If you disagree, be brave enough to stake your position now. On enforceability. Technically it's enforceable, in the same way prohibitions on apostasy are enforceable: you collect testimony and you punish people. Detection here hinges on the professor's gut. Too many em dashes? F. You don't have the occasional typo? Sus! The pro-enforcement camp implicitly assumes professors possess some innate AI-detection power. They don't. The result is a regime saturated with Type 1 and Type 2 errors. oh, and if you mess up your bluebooking? a citation to a non-existent source automatically "raise[s] a presumption of prohibited AI use." But I care more about the pedagogy. Tucked into the rule is a prohibition on uploading "course materials, including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content" into generative AI systems. That means a Berkeley student can't ask ChatGPT to quiz them before an exam. Can't ask it to explain voir dire at a tractable level. Can't use it as a patient, infinite, on-demand tutor on the vagaries of the rule against perpetuities These are extraordinary tools, and we're building more of them (wait for it). Students at competing schools will have them. Berkeley students won't. Beyond the competitive disadvantage, the harder question is this: how do faculty explain that this isn't about protecting professorial IP, real or imagined, but about serving students? The motte defenders retreat to is this: we need to build Core Competencies(TM), and you can't do that by letting students reach for AI on day one. The motte's true. But it is vastly narrower than the bailey that the policy creates. The policy rests on the assumption that the core competencies of a 1990 lawyer will remain the core competencies of a 2029 lawyer, that the AI revolution will be no bigger than the move from print reporters to Boolean searching on Westlaw. That's wild! Practice is already changing. If you don't have an agentic swarm running in the background right now, you're behind. Push defenders on which competencies, exactly, and the answers fall into three buckets. First, skills heading for obsolescence: manual bluebooking, drafting boilerplate from scratch, first-pass document review, summarizing depositions by hand. Second, skills that are real but almost certainly better trained with AI than against it: issue spotting drilled against an infinite supply of hypotheticals, brief feedback in seconds rather than weeks, writing improved through structured iteration with a tireless reader. Third, skills so vague they can't be measured. "Thinking like a lawyer." "Professional judgment." For these we have no way to know whether AI helps or hurts, yet the policy assumes it must hurt. But it's only a default, right? Well defaults matter, and this one's sticky. Professors have to opt out in writing. Even when they do, students *must* disclose every instance of AI use, which today already implicates using Google. Any ambiguity resolves against the student. The structural message is legible and loud: AI use is presumptively cheating. That message is wrong about almost everything. It's wrong about the technology, which isn't a shortcut but a new kind of cognitive partner. It's wrong about practice, where AI is already pervasive in the firms students are about to enter. It's wrong about teaching, by suggesting pedagogy needs no innovation in the face of the most powerful educational tool in a generation. And it's wrong about students, by casting those who use AI thoughtfully as people who lack fundamental skills, rather than as the lawyers Berkeley should be proudest to graduate. The best legal careers of the next decade will belong to lawyers who know when to use AI, when not to, how to verify it, how to weave it into legal reasoning, and how to supervise it in client matters. Policies like this one belong to those who resigned themselves to sit out this future.

This is a bad policy. Lots of people are calling it unenforceable. They're almost right, but that's not the real issue. It's a bad policy because it's bad pedagogy. First, a prediction: Berkeley walks this back within three years. If you disagree, be brave enough to stake your position now. On enforceability. Technically it's enforceable, in the same way prohibitions on apostasy are enforceable: you collect testimony and you punish people. Detection here hinges on the professor's gut. Too many em dashes? F. You don't have the occasional typo? Sus! The pro-enforcement camp implicitly assumes professors possess some innate AI-detection power. They don't. The result is a regime saturated with Type 1 and Type 2 errors. oh, and if you mess up your bluebooking? a citation to a non-existent source automatically "raise[s] a presumption of prohibited AI use." But I care more about the pedagogy. Tucked into the rule is a prohibition on uploading "course materials, including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content" into generative AI systems. That means a Berkeley student can't ask ChatGPT to quiz them before an exam. Can't ask it to explain voir dire at a tractable level. Can't use it as a patient, infinite, on-demand tutor on the vagaries of the rule against perpetuities These are extraordinary tools, and we're building more of them (wait for it). Students at competing schools will have them. Berkeley students won't. Beyond the competitive disadvantage, the harder question is this: how do faculty explain that this isn't about protecting professorial IP, real or imagined, but about serving students? The motte defenders retreat to is this: we need to build Core Competencies(TM), and you can't do that by letting students reach for AI on day one. The motte's true. But it is vastly narrower than the bailey that the policy creates. The policy rests on the assumption that the core competencies of a 1990 lawyer will remain the core competencies of a 2029 lawyer, that the AI revolution will be no bigger than the move from print reporters to Boolean searching on Westlaw. That's wild! Practice is already changing. If you don't have an agentic swarm running in the background right now, you're behind. Push defenders on which competencies, exactly, and the answers fall into three buckets. First, skills heading for obsolescence: manual bluebooking, drafting boilerplate from scratch, first-pass document review, summarizing depositions by hand. Second, skills that are real but almost certainly better trained with AI than against it: issue spotting drilled against an infinite supply of hypotheticals, brief feedback in seconds rather than weeks, writing improved through structured iteration with a tireless reader. Third, skills so vague they can't be measured. "Thinking like a lawyer." "Professional judgment." For these we have no way to know whether AI helps or hurts, yet the policy assumes it must hurt. But it's only a default, right? Well defaults matter, and this one's sticky. Professors have to opt out in writing. Even when they do, students *must* disclose every instance of AI use, which today already implicates using Google. Any ambiguity resolves against the student. The structural message is legible and loud: AI use is presumptively cheating. That message is wrong about almost everything. It's wrong about the technology, which isn't a shortcut but a new kind of cognitive partner. It's wrong about practice, where AI is already pervasive in the firms students are about to enter. It's wrong about teaching, by suggesting pedagogy needs no innovation in the face of the most powerful educational tool in a generation. And it's wrong about students, by casting those who use AI thoughtfully as people who lack fundamental skills, rather than as the lawyers Berkeley should be proudest to graduate. The best legal careers of the next decade will belong to lawyers who know when to use AI, when not to, how to verify it, how to weave it into legal reasoning, and how to supervise it in client matters. Policies like this one belong to those who resigned themselves to sit out this future.