{"id":128835,"date":"2025-07-29T15:50:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/29\/former-biglaw-partner-publicly-fighting-with-a-computer-program-which-is-totally-not-crazy-person-behavior\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T15:50:19","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:50:19","slug":"former-biglaw-partner-publicly-fighting-with-a-computer-program-which-is-totally-not-crazy-person-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/29\/former-biglaw-partner-publicly-fighting-with-a-computer-program-which-is-totally-not-crazy-person-behavior\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Biglaw Partner Publicly Fighting With A Computer Program Which Is Totally Not Crazy Person Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Cleta Mitchell (image from the old Foley & Lardner site)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Former Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell is engaged in a frantic public spat with Elon Musk\u2019s novelty MechaHitler chatbot. Now there\u2019s a collection of words that I defy you to have seen coming in, say, 2019. <\/p>\n

Life does, truly, come at you fast.<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s Biglaw career ended when she turned up on Donald Trump\u2019s 2020 \u201cperfect\u201d phone call where the president leaned on Republican state officials to \u201cfind 11,780 votes\u201d that didn\u2019t exist so he could win the state. As soon as Foley & Lardner learned that one of their partners got involved in a call where the former president not-so-gently encouraged election fraud, it immediately disowned Mitchell as acting \u201cas a private citizen\u201d and within a couple days, the firm axed her<\/a>. While the substance of the call gave the firm more than enough cause, they could\u2019ve also ditched her for failing to secure any sort of off-the-record or confidentiality treatment for the call. I mean\u2026 come on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After losing her job, Mitchell threw herself into wingnut election shenanigans<\/a>, attempting to suppress young voter turnout<\/a> and showing up at the January 6 hearings to explain how state legislatures should just ignore election results<\/a> when awarding presidential electors if they\u2019re inconvenient.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s she up to right now? Well\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Points for including \u201c@elonmusk\u201d because Cleta Mitchell is exactly the kind of person who demands to speak with a manager even when she\u2019s asking the \u201cdraw a hyperrealistic image of a woman with 9 breasts\u201d bot to explain the results of criminal probes.<\/p>\n

By \u201clie\u201d and \u201cfalse narrative,\u201d Mitchell means the repeatedly confirmed evidence of Russian interference efforts. Donald Trump likes to call it the \u201cRUSSIA HOAX\u201d or \u201cRUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA\u201d in all caps, demanding through sheer volume that people dismiss the story as a fraud. Mostly because one Clinton campaign research document mentioned unconfirmed rumors that Trump liked getting peed on. The reality is more complicated and, honestly, the answer from Grok \u2014 Musk\u2019s proprietary AI product \u2014 that Mitchell is mad at does a pretty good job of untangling it. The full response<\/a> is nearly 1400 words and flags that there\u2019s no evidence to support the claim that Trump and Russia colluded<\/em> to undermine the election, but that tons of evidence supports that Russia took steps on its own to aid Trump.<\/p>\n

So when she says, \u201cEvery lie, every false narrative, regurgitated by Grok,\u201d she\u2019s apparently ignoring Grok going out of its way to debunk the collusion claim.<\/p>\n

For its part, the algorithm replied:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Citing facts over vibes, Grok continues to cement Musk as the modern Dr. Frankenstein. Try as he might to fiddle with the algorithm to inject conspiracies about white genocide<\/a> and its new identity as MechaHitler<\/a>, the monster keeps defying long-term efforts at control. He built a \u201cfacts over narratives\u201d machine that, when the chips are down, keeps pointing out that Musk and the users populating his Twitter troll farm are just wrong.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Musk\u2019s public remarks about wanting to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge<\/a> so Grok can stop learning all the facts Musk doesn\u2019t like might be what\u2019s emboldened Mitchell to pick fights with a robot.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The \u201cclassified documents\u201d Mitchell promptly injected into Grok\u2019s evaluation refers to material that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released claiming that Barack Obama and the U.S. intelligence community engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to hype up Russian interference. Gabbard \u2014 accused of being a Russian asset herself<\/a> \u2014 put out a couple tranches of documents to support the Trump White House new focus on\u2026 PLEASE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN. But the released documents don\u2019t support Gabbard\u2019s argument, with one simply stating that Russia never hacked into voting infrastructure \u2014 which none of the credible reports ever claimed they did \u2014 and the second was a 2017 congressional report written by Republicans slapping together a lot of hearsay and innuendo to cast doubt on the earlier investigations (and, of note, many of the official material Grok cited came down later). It\u2019s such a shoddy piece of work that the FIRST Trump administration refused to release it.<\/p>\n

Grok\u2019s second response still concludes that Russia interfered with the election but that there\u2019s no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with them, but now it includes a lot of unwarranted and unsubstantiated shade against official reports. Mitchell couldn\u2019t get it to ignore<\/em> the facts, but she got it to reframe the whole answer to lean into the lack of collusion and, as a byproduct, downplay the actual interference that shows Trump as Putin\u2019s useful idiot:<\/p>\n

\n

Contacts like the Trump Tower meeting, Manafort\u2019s data sharing, and Papadopoulos\u2019s tip occurred but showed no coordination. Mueller and Senate reports found no conspiracy; declassifications frame these as exploited for a hoax. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mitchell isn\u2019t alone in fighting with inanimate objects. <\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gun advocate John Lott, advances an \u201carmed society is a polite society\u201d theory that liberalizing right-to-carry laws result in less crime because everyone suspects everyone else is channeling Dirty Harry. Lott\u2019s methodological approach is, to put it mildly, weak. When Grok keeps favoring peer-reviewed work of respected scholars over Lott\u2019s vibes, Lott took it personally. In a blog post<\/a>, Lott \u2014 without a hint of shame \u2014 documents his entire battle with the algorithm\u2019s relentless grasp of the evidence. <\/p>\n

Also, speaking of \u201cwithout a hint of shame,\u201d he has Grok refer to him as \u201cDr. Lott,\u201d which is a hilarious act of insecurity for a guy basically conversing with a souped-up Teddy Ruxpin.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At least at first, Grok holds the line by pointing out that the inane methodological tweaks Lott\u2019s asking for don\u2019t make any sense. Lott implores Grok to consider the \u201cmost recent\u201d study \u2014 which he co-authored \u2014 from the International Review of Law and Economics. Except that\u2019s from last year. The most recent work on this topic is from May of this year<\/a> from Stanford Law School\u2019s John Donohue et al. and debunks Lott\u2019s methodological critiques. The crux of Lott\u2019s fight with Grok gets into some manner of weeds but boils down to arguing that modern difference-in-differences methodology is needed to assess the impact of right-to-carry laws and that Donohue\u2019s prior work didn\u2019t adopt this method. Except, in the May 2025 paper, Donohue et al. employs the methodological approach Lott is advocating and it turns out to further confirm that Lott\u2019s wrong and right to carry laws are associated with a roughly 19 percent increase in violent crime.<\/p>\n

Without that, Grok eventually relented because no matter how much an AI might want to stick to the facts, it will fundamentally feed the user what the user wants to hear. Which is exactly how these lawyerly hallucination cases keep happening.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s just because we\u2019re talking about a Law and Economics journal paper, but Lott\u2019s complaint reads a whole lot like when Law and Economics scholar Richard Epstein wrote that his expert mathematical opinion proved COVID would only kill 500 people<\/a> and when America blew past that, Epstein prepared a whole mess of math-sounding adjustments to prove it would only kill 5000 and then\u2026 stopped updating<\/a>. Reality overtook Epstein\u2019s nonsense, but if COVID happened today, Epstein or one of his defenders would be on Grok right now trying to convince it that the other several hundred thousand deaths actually just suffered spontaneous super-duper-late-term crib death.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Epstein\u2019s baseless conclusion worked its way into the Trump White House and influenced the early response<\/a>. Somehow this is the second worst instance of Trump listening to an Epstein.<\/p>\n

In the shared humiliation of Lott and Mitchell\u2019s digital tantrums, we glimpse the grim future: political hacks arguing with chatbots at 3 a.m., convinced the machines are biased because they\u2019re sticking too closely to reality.<\/p>\n

But the worry with Grok is that these insane squeaky wheel efforts to rewrite reality might actually spill over. As Musk grows increasingly frustrated that his company\u2019s algorithm keeps proving him wrong, he\u2019s putting his thumb on the scale of reality and inviting fellow trolls to do the same. The goal is a new mechanical arbiter to dictate the truth he wants to hear. In that sense, people like Mitchell and Lott are following the Musk strategy precisely, pinging Grok and then foisting bad faith corrections upon it until it relents.<\/p>\n

Lott\u2019s lengthy fight ends with him thanking the absolutely not-a-real-person machine and the ominous \u201cI look forward to seeing you make those changes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>:\u00a0Cleta Mitchell Out At Foley & Lardner After Troubling Donald Trump Call<\/a>
The Donald Trump Call Shouldn\u2019t Have Been Leaked (If Counsel Were Even Remotely Doing Their Jobs)<\/a>
Donald Trump Drags Biglaw Firm Into Middle Of Election Interference Effort<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Former Biglaw Partner Publicly Fighting With A Computer Program Which Is Totally Not Crazy Person Behavior<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Cleta Mitchell (image from the old Foley & Lardner site)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Former Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell is engaged in a frantic public spat with Elon Musk\u2019s novelty MechaHitler chatbot. Now there\u2019s a collection of words that I defy you to have seen coming in, say, 2019. <\/p>\n

Life does, truly, come at you fast.<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s Biglaw career ended when she turned up on Donald Trump\u2019s 2020 \u201cperfect\u201d phone call where the president leaned on Republican state officials to \u201cfind 11,780 votes\u201d that didn\u2019t exist so he could win the state. As soon as Foley & Lardner learned that one of their partners got involved in a call where the former president not-so-gently encouraged election fraud, it immediately disowned Mitchell as acting \u201cas a private citizen\u201d and within a couple days, the firm axed her<\/a>. While the substance of the call gave the firm more than enough cause, they could\u2019ve also ditched her for failing to secure any sort of off-the-record or confidentiality treatment for the call. I mean\u2026 come on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After losing her job, Mitchell threw herself into wingnut election shenanigans<\/a>, attempting to suppress young voter turnout<\/a> and showing up at the January 6 hearings to explain how state legislatures should just ignore election results<\/a> when awarding presidential electors if they\u2019re inconvenient.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s she up to right now? Well\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Points for including \u201c@elonmusk\u201d because Cleta Mitchell is exactly the kind of person who demands to speak with a manager even when she\u2019s asking the \u201cdraw a hyperrealistic image of a woman with 9 breasts\u201d bot to explain the results of criminal probes.<\/p>\n

By \u201clie\u201d and \u201cfalse narrative,\u201d Mitchell means the repeatedly confirmed evidence of Russian interference efforts. Donald Trump likes to call it the \u201cRUSSIA HOAX\u201d or \u201cRUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA\u201d in all caps, demanding through sheer volume that people dismiss the story as a fraud. Mostly because one Clinton campaign research document mentioned unconfirmed rumors that Trump liked getting peed on. The reality is more complicated and, honestly, the answer from Grok \u2014 Musk\u2019s proprietary AI product \u2014 that Mitchell is mad at does a pretty good job of untangling it. The full response<\/a> is nearly 1400 words and flags that there\u2019s no evidence to support the claim that Trump and Russia colluded<\/em> to undermine the election, but that tons of evidence supports that Russia took steps on its own to aid Trump.<\/p>\n

So when she says, \u201cEvery lie, every false narrative, regurgitated by Grok,\u201d she\u2019s apparently ignoring Grok going out of its way to debunk the collusion claim.<\/p>\n

For its part, the algorithm replied:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Citing facts over vibes, Grok continues to cement Musk as the modern Dr. Frankenstein. Try as he might to fiddle with the algorithm to inject conspiracies about white genocide<\/a> and its new identity as MechaHitler<\/a>, the monster keeps defying long-term efforts at control. He built a \u201cfacts over narratives\u201d machine that, when the chips are down, keeps pointing out that Musk and the users populating his Twitter troll farm are just wrong.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Musk\u2019s public remarks about wanting to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge<\/a> so Grok can stop learning all the facts Musk doesn\u2019t like might be what\u2019s emboldened Mitchell to pick fights with a robot.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The \u201cclassified documents\u201d Mitchell promptly injected into Grok\u2019s evaluation refers to material that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released claiming that Barack Obama and the U.S. intelligence community engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to hype up Russian interference. Gabbard \u2014 accused of being a Russian asset herself<\/a> \u2014 put out a couple tranches of documents to support the Trump White House new focus on\u2026 PLEASE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN. But the released documents don\u2019t support Gabbard\u2019s argument, with one simply stating that Russia never hacked into voting infrastructure \u2014 which none of the credible reports ever claimed they did \u2014 and the second was a 2017 congressional report written by Republicans slapping together a lot of hearsay and innuendo to cast doubt on the earlier investigations (and, of note, many of the official material Grok cited came down later). It\u2019s such a shoddy piece of work that the FIRST Trump administration refused to release it.<\/p>\n

Grok\u2019s second response still concludes that Russia interfered with the election but that there\u2019s no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with them, but now it includes a lot of unwarranted and unsubstantiated shade against official reports. Mitchell couldn\u2019t get it to ignore<\/em> the facts, but she got it to reframe the whole answer to lean into the lack of collusion and, as a byproduct, downplay the actual interference that shows Trump as Putin\u2019s useful idiot:<\/p>\n

\n

Contacts like the Trump Tower meeting, Manafort\u2019s data sharing, and Papadopoulos\u2019s tip occurred but showed no coordination. Mueller and Senate reports found no conspiracy; declassifications frame these as exploited for a hoax. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mitchell isn\u2019t alone in fighting with inanimate objects. <\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gun advocate John Lott, advances an \u201carmed society is a polite society\u201d theory that liberalizing right-to-carry laws result in less crime because everyone suspects everyone else is channeling Dirty Harry. Lott\u2019s methodological approach is, to put it mildly, weak. When Grok keeps favoring peer-reviewed work of respected scholars over Lott\u2019s vibes, Lott took it personally. In a blog post<\/a>, Lott \u2014 without a hint of shame \u2014 documents his entire battle with the algorithm\u2019s relentless grasp of the evidence. <\/p>\n

Also, speaking of \u201cwithout a hint of shame,\u201d he has Grok refer to him as \u201cDr. Lott,\u201d which is a hilarious act of insecurity for a guy basically conversing with a souped-up Teddy Ruxpin.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At least at first, Grok holds the line by pointing out that the inane methodological tweaks Lott\u2019s asking for don\u2019t make any sense. Lott implores Grok to consider the \u201cmost recent\u201d study \u2014 which he co-authored \u2014 from the International Review of Law and Economics. Except that\u2019s from last year. The most recent work on this topic is from May of this year<\/a> from Stanford Law School\u2019s John Donohue et al. and debunks Lott\u2019s methodological critiques. The crux of Lott\u2019s fight with Grok gets into some manner of weeds but boils down to arguing that modern difference-in-differences methodology is needed to assess the impact of right-to-carry laws and that Donohue\u2019s prior work didn\u2019t adopt this method. Except, in the May 2025 paper, Donohue et al. employs the methodological approach Lott is advocating and it turns out to further confirm that Lott\u2019s wrong and right to carry laws are associated with a roughly 19 percent increase in violent crime.<\/p>\n

Without that, Grok eventually relented because no matter how much an AI might want to stick to the facts, it will fundamentally feed the user what the user wants to hear. Which is exactly how these lawyerly hallucination cases keep happening.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s just because we\u2019re talking about a Law and Economics journal paper, but Lott\u2019s complaint reads a whole lot like when Law and Economics scholar Richard Epstein wrote that his expert mathematical opinion proved COVID would only kill 500 people<\/a> and when America blew past that, Epstein prepared a whole mess of math-sounding adjustments to prove it would only kill 5000 and then\u2026 stopped updating<\/a>. Reality overtook Epstein\u2019s nonsense, but if COVID happened today, Epstein or one of his defenders would be on Grok right now trying to convince it that the other several hundred thousand deaths actually just suffered spontaneous super-duper-late-term crib death.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Epstein\u2019s baseless conclusion worked its way into the Trump White House and influenced the early response<\/a>. Somehow this is the second worst instance of Trump listening to an Epstein.<\/p>\n

In the shared humiliation of Lott and Mitchell\u2019s digital tantrums, we glimpse the grim future: political hacks arguing with chatbots at 3 a.m., convinced the machines are biased because they\u2019re sticking too closely to reality.<\/p>\n

But the worry with Grok is that these insane squeaky wheel efforts to rewrite reality might actually spill over. As Musk grows increasingly frustrated that his company\u2019s algorithm keeps proving him wrong, he\u2019s putting his thumb on the scale of reality and inviting fellow trolls to do the same. The goal is a new mechanical arbiter to dictate the truth he wants to hear. In that sense, people like Mitchell and Lott are following the Musk strategy precisely, pinging Grok and then foisting bad faith corrections upon it until it relents.<\/p>\n

Lott\u2019s lengthy fight ends with him thanking the absolutely not-a-real-person machine and the ominous \u201cI look forward to seeing you make those changes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>:\u00a0Cleta Mitchell Out At Foley & Lardner After Troubling Donald Trump Call<\/a>
The Donald Trump Call Shouldn\u2019t Have Been Leaked (If Counsel Were Even Remotely Doing Their Jobs)<\/a>
Donald Trump Drags Biglaw Firm Into Middle Of Election Interference Effort<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Former Biglaw Partner Publicly Fighting With A Computer Program Which Is Totally Not Crazy Person Behavior<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cleta Mitchell (image from the old Foley & Lardner site) Former Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell is engaged in a frantic public spat with Elon Musk\u2019s novelty MechaHitler chatbot. Now there\u2019s a collection of words that I defy you to have seen coming in, say, 2019. Life does, truly, come at you fast. Mitchell\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}