In the legal jungles of Calcutta

This post is about me being sued in India, but mostly about using LLMs. In 2022 I got the pile above in the mail. It turned out that this was a further iteration of the Indian lawsuit that named me as a codefendant (along with, er, Google and Yahoo) because I ran a mailing list archive called Gmane, and somebody had posted something possibly defamatory there. I’ve been clearing out the loft (because I want to put more stuff up there), so I was just going to throw this bundle out… But then it occurred to me that if I scanned the pile (I’ve got a scanner and I know how to use it), I could just run it through my OCR pipeline and then ask an LLM to summarise what it’s all about. I’ve been moderately curious, but not sufficiently to actually try to poke at the pile before. And even people who say that they’re AI sceptics add “but you can use AI to do research, for instance to summarise documents”, and… I’ve been sceptical about those sceptics, because whenever I try to use an LLM, it…