I want my students to have experience with Adobe Acrobat and pdfs before their first summer jobs, so I ask that they submit their final appellate brief in pdf. The trouble is the word count. Adobe has not deemed it a necessary tool. I made a plugin.

Now, obviously, I’m a wordsmith, not a coder, but as most have discovered, generative AI has made it easy to solve work problems that are so niche no one has already solved them. I spent about an hour on this plugin. In full disclosure, I had created an Adobe plugin before. It was years ago, but I was somewhat familiar with the basic steps. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Adobe Reader is the basic, free app. Adobe Acrobat Pro is the actual app with the bells and whistles. Some don’t realize there are many, many tools available if you click All Tools. And you can add your own tools. Creation/coding for your tools happens outside of Adobe Acrobat Pro, and depending on your version of Acrobat Pro and operating system, the precise code varies. If you or your school hasn’t invested in the Adobe suite, do yourself a favor and prioritize the subscription from your PDF funds (see what I did there?). Back then, creating the plugin – for which I now can’t remember the purpose – was painful and took a couple of days of trial and error, searching high and low on obscure internet forums, etc. For this one, I simply gave Claude my vision. But if I didn’t have that foundational knowledge, I don’t think I could’ve had an intelligent exchange with Claude to produce what I needed, and the lack of basic skills would’ve turned it into a multi-hour project.

I made the commercial just for fun to see how AI video production has improved over the last year. Meh. I don’t know how production companies are creating entire, BEAUTIFUL films. I could never get a video of more than 20 seconds, and even applying the same descriptors and instructions, it never produced clips that had continuity (same lighting, office space, etc.). At the end of the day, I was left with several clips I had to splice together in iMovie.

I think this is an important realization for all the fear-mongers worried about jobs. Sure, the AI product can do the task, but it can’t do it well unless the person driving the machine knows what to ask for. I feel like I have pretty strong video editing skills; I was even a partner in a film company and have been on sets with cameras and all that jazz. I’ve sat for hours in editing bays to filter microseconds of footage. Yet, this was the best I could get out of Sora 2 Pro and Wan. Wan was much more successful. So yes, a layperson could probably produce an appellate brief with AI, but doing so would take them many more hours than an actual attorney, require lots of trial and error, and leave them with little assurance of the work.

This is sort of like your ego-driven spouse insisting you don’t need to call a plumber. Yes, they can probably find instructions, a video, and help at Home Depot, but were they prepared for the old PVC pipe to crumble into shards as soon as they turned the wrench? On-the-spot problem-solving with AI is rarely a practical approach, unless the user is already extremely skilled on the topic. For this example, I could have kept messing around with it and produced something amazing, but at some point, the learning curve becomes too steep to return an efficient work product. And sometimes a worker could do the task much more efficiently on their own. We don’t need an AI solution for every little thing. You wouldn’t cut a wedding cake with a chainsaw. I mean, we could, but oh, what a mess we’d make! And if the bride and groom have never used a chainsaw, they should probably leave it to the professionals.

We must teach students to, as Tracy Norton (LSU) says, have a cautious skepticism about new technologies while embracing the possibilities (Sorry, I mangled your brilliant quote, Tracy!). The basic rules of professional responsibility and human morality still apply, even as technology evolves.