Christian Turner

Account created... now what?

@OrinKerr @ARozenshtein @IThinkIAgree This study sheds some light, showing that even MFA-trained writers preferred AI-written excerpts when the AI was fine-tuned on the works of a famous author. When the tell-tale voice of the assistant disappears, so too does some of the aesthetic distaste. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Got it. I think AI's writing is always good. It's trained to please the human instinct, and so it learns the patterns of how to arrange things. Sometimes it's annoying in that capacity, as humans can be pleased by click-baity sort of breathless writing. But perhaps the most striking part about AI is how well it writes. It makes it seem like the ideas must be there, as it sure is well written in how it presents it. As for the substance, depends? Sometimes it's amazing, sometimes mediocre, sometimes bad. And it's often writing about things that people don't know much about—after all, that's often why we're asking—so we may not be judges of how good it is substantively. We can just tell that it writes extremely well.

Re the current debate over in AI in academic writing, the sharp distinction people are drawing between AI for writing and for research strikes me as based less on a coherent ethical distinction and more on the fact that, currently, a lot (most?) of AI writing is bad, whereas a lot of AI research can be quite good. And some are taking and hoping that it represents some fundamental feature of the technology (because if not then legal academics are cooked). But there’s nothing special about writing as a test of AI capabilities. Writing is just (like all forms of human cognitive capability, viewed at a high enough level of abstraction) pattern matching and AIs will hill climb that just as they have every other (pardon the mixed metaphor) previously moved goalpost. In a few years this will be inarguable, at which point debates about AI disclosure will become pointless and the real question will be: what are all of us who have spent our lives preparing for this narrow knowledge work career supposed to do with our lives? It’s a scary question! But it’s no excuse for clinging to a labor theory of value for our work, or to question-begging claims that only humans can produce “real knowledge,” or of making the argument that our salaries (which are mostly paid for by the tuition dollars of our students, who have no say in the matter) should primarily go to our own feelings of professional satisfaction and self expression. There are still good arguments against AI in scholarship, but they have to be about the harm to others/society, not to the people getting paid to produce the scholarship.

@jackclarkSF @karpathy It's been a long road, but Artificial Legal Agents and the Alien Stance is the result. Hope you like it!

Learning the technical details of the transformer and other deep learning architectures and then building a big app that leverages them were critical to my developing anything substantial to say about AI. I've learned so much from so many (especially @jackclarkSF and @karpathy).

I'm grateful to @lsolum for engaging with and promoting my work on AI and law. I've made an audio version of the paper available here: hydratext.com/blog/2026/2/26…— and a critical faculty workshop made with my app enTalkenator here: entalkenator.com/podcast/artifi… legaltheoryblog.com/2026/03/05/tur…

This paper results from experiences that go all the way back to my math days, when I (embarassingly in retrospect but consistent with the sometimes-smugness of a young math grad student) scoffed at curve-fitting phenomena as a substitute for understanding them. 2/x

(5) This includes "analog zones" in law. (2/2) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

My new paper on modern AI. I argue: (1) It thinks, and denying this is dangerous. (2) Models are individual alien intelligences. (3) They deceptively activate the intentional stance. (4) We need a socially-supported alien stance to meet this challenge. (1/2)

These are deeply fascinating papers. I added intro classes and an academic workshop on them to the enTalkenator podcast feed (generated with Sonnet 3.7 in enTalkenator): entalkenator.com/podcast

I guess it’s just my luck that Anthropic is having API issues the day after a lot of new people find out about the app… Claude Sonnet 3.7 is still the best model to use with enTalkenator, but if it hasn’t been working for you this morning, it’s because it’s down.

@an_average_bear @OrinKerr I’ve had a paper (many papers actually!) on the back burner for awhile. Put my brief outline/idea into the app, selected the First Draft template and got 20,000 words out that some law review editors would’ve gone for after adding footnotes.

@an_average_bear @OrinKerr Concerns? Yes. Objections? Depends on how. The app includes built in templates that generate original papers (10-20k words), response papers, and brutal critical responses. But you can modify these. Upshot is that you can put in an outline and get a “normal science” paper out.

"When Artificial Intelligence Workshops Your Article For You—And It's Really Useful" My first post at a new blog about a new app. cc:@christor blog.dividedargument.com/p/when-artific…

@ProfFerguson @OrinKerr Funny you ask. In some versions of the workshop template, I told some participants they might have more a comment than a question. But even using Claude Sonnet (which is what I always select to do these), they said “maybe this is more a comment than a question” annoyingly often.

@OrinKerr @christor Did the AI have more of a comment than a question? And refer to its own scholarship too much?

@clara_winslow @atrupar Should they have the opportunity to show that they are a citizen or otherwise here legally?

@atrupar You are here illegally. There is as much due process for removing you as you did when you entered illegally. Deport them all!

KARL: Do they have any due process at all? HOMAN: Due process -- what was Laken Riley's due process? (That's a "no")

This week is @OrinKerr's fascinating article on data scanning and 4A, following a midweek intro class on a groundbreaking study relating to dark matter. (You should hear/read the response papers it generates to things like a train ticket...) Recommend listening at at least 1.5x.

@lsolum You can search for the enTalkenator podcast in your podcast app or add the link directly -- top of the page here: entalkenator.com/podcast.

I've built an iOS app, enTalkenator, initially intended just to generate audio narrations from PDFs of academic articles. It now, from any text, generates academic workshops, new papers, podcasts, debates, and introductory classes. I describe it here: hydratext.com/blog/2025/2/1/…