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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Here's what I think about: I've seen a pro se defendant reduce a 30-year prosecutor to tears of rage with non-stop well-written motions because the prosecutor had to respond to every single one. The defendant had been through the system a number of times and had learned enough from his trips to be able to write decent motions. He ended up getting a plea on a felony case that the prosecutor had previously swore would never happen (guy had a ton of priors, so still prison, but 1/10th of his risk after trial).

The number of defendants like that is vanishingly small. He was writing those motions from in-custody, which made it all the more impressive. The skill required to do that is very rare.

Once the AI motions get good enough, every out of custody defendant can be that guy. Perhaps the in-custody ones once they figure out a way (probably via family or friends or whatever) to access an AI outside the jail. The system is not prepared for every traffic case, misdemeanor, and felony to turn into a barrage of plausible-sounding motions.

I understand what you're saying, and while I don't practice in criminal court or (presumably) your jurisdiction, my own experience suggests that this is unlikely to happen. As we all learned in law school, the practice of law is the application of the law to the facts of the case. Traditionally, pro se litigants who don't know the law argue the facts and appeal to a vague sense of justice. LLM is the complete opposite since the LLM usually doesn't know anything about the facts but will gladly generate pages upon pages worth of vague legal arguments based on the invariably vague instructions it was given. Even a really good LLM is ultimately limited by the facts the user inputs, which, most of the time, is few to none, because they see it as just a magic box that will spit out something that looks professional but really doesn't do anything. Hence you get a guy with a 300 paragraph brief that doesn't once even hint at the general kind of case that it is.

Overall, though, while I see this as a problem, I only see it as such insofar as acting pro se is generally. If a prosecutor is reduced to tears of rage because he has to respond to endless motions from a pro se litigant and cuts a favorable deal to get out of it, I don't see how that situation is any worse than if the same prosecutor has to deal with the same thing from a team of high-priced attorneys paid for by the father of a wealthy defendant. My concern here is less for the prosecutor and more for the pro se who wastes the court's time and doesn't get a deal when he would have got one had a public defender filed the one motion that had any merit. My concern with LLMs isn't much different than my overall concern with DIY legal solutions where people think they're getting a good deal because they save a little bit of money in the short term but end up getting screwed in the long term.