A Third Circuit Sanction and a Travel Writer's Refusal Are Making the Same Argument

An attorney in the Third Circuit used AI to prepare a legal brief. The brief was riddled with factual and legal inaccuracies. The court notified the attorney. The attorney used AI to prepare a second brief. It had the same problems. The court imposed sanctions. A Bluesky post about the ruling — terse, unembellished, just the facts and a link to the opinion — collected 127 likes in a day, which made it the most-engaged post in the {{beat:ai-science|AI and Science}} conversation this week. The people who liked it weren't surprised. That was the point. The same afternoon, a different Bluesky user described planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip with her mother — the emails to tour operators, the research on flights and vaccinations and travel insurance, the whole unglamorous logistics of it. And then she noted, almost as an aside, that at no point did she think AI tools might make any of this easier. The post got 54 likes, which sounds modest until you read the framing: she wasn't making an argument against AI. She was reporting an absence. The thought simply never occurred to her. That absence is doing more rhetorical work than most explicit critiques. A third voice, cooler and more analytical, arrived in the middle: a journalist noting that AI as a research aid is essentially inevitable for the profession, but pushing back on the normalization of AI doing all the work. The post drew 116 likes — sitting almost exactly between outrage and quiet refusal — and its phrasing was careful in a way that the other two weren't.